Scott Yanow
This Brazilian cultural matrix positions Scott Yanow globally...
Curation
CURATION
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from this page:
by Matrix
The Integrated Global Creative Economy
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Name:
Scott Yanow
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City/Place:
Los Angeles
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Country:
United States
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Hometown:
New York City
Current News
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What's Up?
2020 is my 45th year as a jazz journalist, having started at the age of 3 (well, maybe a little later). I have written 11 books thus far, over 850 liner notes, and approximately 20,000 record reviews through the years. I am a regular contributor to eight magazines (Downbeat, Jazziz, the New York City Jazz Record, the Syncopated Times, the Jazz Rag from England, Jazz Artistry Now, Jazz Monthly and the Los Angeles Jazz Scene), write liner notes, press biographies and press releases for artists and labels, and offer informational lists for sale to independent jazz musicians. I’m always open to working on new assignments, discovering new artists and hearing more great jazz.
Life & Work
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Bio:
Age 15:
Jazz caught my ear from the time I was 15. I first heard Dixieland in the Danny Kaye movie The Five Pennies and on a daily radio show hosted by the late Benson Curtis. My very first record was The Very Best Of Al Hirt & Pete Fountain. I discovered Swing when I ran across Chuck Cecil's Swinging Years on the radio.
College:
At college, roommates thought I had a huge record collection when they saw my 25 Lps, but were dismayed to find out that it was all dixieland and swing. One day at a used record store, I ran across a $1.99 Charlie Parker LP that, among other songs, included "White Christmas." I had never heard of "Groovin’ High" or "A Night In Tunisia" but at least I had heard "White Christmas" somewhere! I played the album two or three times each day for a week. It took about five days for my ears to be opened and then I became quite anxious to learn about all eras of jazz. Within two months I was into John Coltrane's 1966 explorations with Pharoah Sanders and Miles Davis' Live/Evil, quite a jump from Pete Fountain. My desire to own and hear every jazz recording is still my goal.
Accounting Degree:
After I graduated college with an accounting degree, rather than get a real job, I became the jazz editor for Record Review, a now-legendary music magazine that lasted for 44 issues. That experience and its publisher Brian Ashley started me in the jazz writing business.
Jazz Journalist and Historian:
Since then, I have been involved in many projects. Being the Senior Editor for the 3rd edition of the All Music Guide For Jazz resulted in a countless number of my CD reviews and biographies being utilized throughout the internet including Pandora Radio. In addition to having written ten books so far (most recently The Jazz Singers) and writing for the Jazz Heritage Club, I have written several episodes for the popular jazz radio series Jim Cullum's Riverwalk - Live At The Landing.
I have written over 750 liner notes, hundreds of press biographies and press releases, and it has been said that I have reviewed more jazz recordings than anyone in history. I have contributed to virtually all of the major jazz magazines including Downbeat, Jazz Times, Jazziz, Cadence, Coda, The Mississippi Rag, Jazz Forum, Jazz News, The Jazz Report, Planet Jazz, Jazz Now and Jazz Improv. These days I write regularly for Jazz Inside, Downbeat, Jazziz, Los Angeles Jazz Scene and The Jazz Rag. In addition, I offer a variety of services for jazz and blues performers.
I have also written for several jazz festival programs. The biographies and discographies that I wrote for the Playboy Jazz Festival and the San Francisco Jazz Festival programs can be found at Festival Program Guides.
For the past 20 years Jim Cullum and his jazz band's "Live from he Landing" radio series which is nationally syndicated, has presented hundreds of programs that focus on vintage jazz with a different topic each week. I have contributed writing for their various scripts. A few of these programs include clarinetists Johnny Dodds, trumpeter Henry "Red" Allen and cornetist Red Nichols.
The "Jazz from the Movies" show focused on my book Jazz On Film. It included a lot of fine music from Jim Cullum and his guests including trumpeter Bob Barnard.
More
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Quotes, Notes & Etc.
Bio's, CD Liner Notes, Press Releases, Reviews:
Every artist needs a great bio and an informative website. All artists need visibility which leads to more CD sales, gigs, concerts and general success. Every CD needs well-written liner notes. There is no point in putting out exciting recordings that few get to hear.
I have written over 750 liner notes and hundreds of press biographies. For liner notes or a new bio, I interview you over the phone, have the writing to you within a week, and make any updates that you would like. I also write press releases.
In addition to writing CD reviews for magazines, I also write reviews specifically for artist's websites that they can use in their press kits.
My Writing
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Publications:
The Great Jazz Guitarists: The Ultimate Guide is my latest book. It includes entries on 342 great jazz guitarists plus shorter mentions of 219 others. It relates the interesting story of the jazz guitar, its fight to replace the banjo in the 1920s, to be audible in the '30s, and its successful battle to be accepted as an important instrument in jazz.
The Jazz Singers has full-length entries on 521 singers. In addition to the historic figures (from Marion Harris and Billie Holiday to Ella Fitzgerald and Abbey Lincoln, it covers today's jazz scene in depth with original quotes from 270 jazz vocalists. It also includes a paragraph apiece on 198 other singers of today, short mentions of 55 often-surprising performers who recorded as a jazz singer on at least on one occasion, and entries on 30 jazz vocal groups. In addition, it has my pick for the ten songs that all singers should try to avoid.
Jazz On Film is a book that was really needed. In it I review 1,400 films, documentaries, shorts, videos and DVDs, all of which have at least a brief appearance by a jazz instrumentalist or singer onscreen, not just on the soundtrack. I rate both the music and the quality of the movies, from 10 (classic) to 1 (stinks).
Jazz On Record – The First Sixty Years is over 800 pages and discusses what every key jazz performer was up to during each decade. I put some humor and trivia in the time line sections, kept the thousands of record reviews very short, and portrayed the entire jazz world during every period. Swing did not disappear in 1945, bebop was still thriving in the 1960s and 70s, and newer styles did not replace older ones. I cut off the book in 1976 when every jazz style was alive and co-existing with each other.
Jazz: A Regional Exploration discusses the history of jazz and its different styles in an unusual way, by cities and regions. From New Orleans and Chicago to Kansas City and New York, jazz had many regional styles, all of which are covered in this survey of the music's first 100 years.
The trumpet has always been my favorite instrument even though I cannot get a decent note out of that illogical horn. Trumpet Kings has biographies of 479 trumpeters from all styles and covers every soloist of importance from 1901-2001. It includes many original quotes gathered from questionnaires that I sent to all of the living trumpeters and there is a liberal amount of humor since many trumpeters are simply crazy! From Buddy Bolden to Freddie Webster, from Jack Sheldon to Dave Douglas, they are all here.
Afro-Cuban Jazz focuses on the history, current scene and legacy of Latin jazz, one of the most creative styles of music around today. I separated jazz from Cuba from that of Brazil (which could be a separate book altogether), focusing on the former. The book discusses the main innovators of each era in alphabetical order from Tito Puente and Cal Tjader to David Sanchez and Chucho Valdes and has a section called “They Also Recorded Afro-Cuban Jazz” which talks about the Latin recordings of more mainstream jazz musicians.
Since dixieland and early jazz are my first love, it was only right that I would write a book on the 1920s. Classic Jazz puts the spotlight on the 1917-33 period, from the hot soloists to the early big bands, the classic blues singers to the famous ensembles. It was a pleasure really digging into that period, and I do not think that I missed anyone of significance in my biographies or in my reviews of the era's recordings.
In Bebop, I cover both the classic bop era (1945-49) and the bop-oriented soloists who matured in later years. The most difficult part about writing this book was separating bop from cool jazz and hard bop since many musicians and singers constantly cross those boundaries. In addition to Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Fats Navarro, Thelonious Monk and their contemporaries, this book discusses the more advanced stylists of the swing era, the swing big bands’ individual reactions to bop and the many bebop recordings.
I wanted Swing to be a different type of book, not just sticking to the swing era but covering all aspects of swing music through historic essays, biographies and record reviews. It discusses swing of the 1920s, the band leaders, top soloists and singers of the Swing era (1935-46) and the top swing stylists that came to prominence after the big band era ended. In addition, it was the first mainstream book to take the Retro-Swing movement of the 1980s and ‘90s and groups such as the Royal Crown Revue and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy seriously.
The third edition of the All Music Guide To Jazz gave me the opportunity to write thousands of record reviews about everyone from Bix Beiderbecke to Cecil Taylor, Louis Armstrong to John Coltrane. With its concise biographies and historic essays, it is one of the major jazz reference books.
Duke Ellington is a beautiful photo book that has many rare shots of Ellington and his sidemen from the 1920s to the 1970s. I wrote a lengthy biographical essay that accompanies the classic shots. Ellington was such a remarkable musician (pianist, composer, arranger and band leader) and during every year of 1926-73, his orchestra ranked with the top five of the time.
In 2008, I wrote the text to a rather unusual book. The talented Dutch photographer Jaap van de Klomp traveled the world taking beautiful photos of the graves of scores of jazz immortals. The large book that resulted, Jazz Lives - Till We Shall Meet And Never Part, is a rather unique masterpiece and not downbeat in the slightest. I had the honor of writing the 180 or so biographies and, in addition to the photos of the graves, there is a photo apiece of each musician and singer in his or her prime. Published in the Netherlands by Bruna Uitgevers, this will not be an easy book to find and it is not inexpensive, but it is a gem. Look for it on the internet at www.JazzLives.nl
Clips (more may be added)
The Integrated Global Creative Economy (we invented the concept) uncoils from Brazil's sprawling Indigenous, African, Sephardic and then Ashkenazic, Arabic, European, Asian cultural matrix... concatenating branches of a virtual rainforest tree rooted in Bahia, canopy spreading to embrace the entire planet...
Ex Terra Brasilis
A starting point for this project was the culture born in Brazil's quilombos (in Angola a "quilombo" is a village; in Brazil it is a village either founded by Africans or Afro-Brazilians who had escaped slavery, or — as in the case of São Francisco do Paraguaçu above — occupied by such after abandonment by the ruling class)...
...theme music for this Brazilian Matrix, from an Afro-Brazilian Mass by
From inside this Matrix, all creators-creative entities everywhere — empowered by the mathematics of network theory — become potentially discoverable by all people worldwide. Go straight to one of the (randomly selected) creators-creative entities below to see how their Matrix Page — information and media, outgoing and incoming curation — works (reload to feature other artists/creators), or find out below the black line below what unsung (metaphorically only) brilliance this is all about:
More on these profound incubators of Afro-Brazilian culture at:
Os Quilombos da Bahia
The Quilombos of Bahia
There are certain countries, the names of which fire the popular imagination. Brazil is one of them; an amalgam of primitive and sophisticated, jungle and elegance, luscious jazz harmonics — there’s no other place like it in the world. And while Rio de Janeiro, or its fame anyway, tends toward the sophisticated end of the spectrum, Bahia bends toward the atavistic…
It’s like a trick of the mind’s light (I suppose), but standing on beach or escarpment in Salvador and looking out across the Baía de Todos os Santos to the great Recôncavo, and mindful of what happened there (and here; the Bahian Recôncavo was final port-of-call for more enslaved human beings than any other place throughout the entirety of mankind’s existence on this planet ... in the past it extended into what is now urban Salvador), one must be led to the inevitable conclusion that one is in a place unique to history, and to the present:
Brazil absorbed over ten times the number of enslaved Africans taken to the United States of America, and is a repository of African deities (and their music) now largely forgotten in their lands of origin.
Brazil was a refuge (of sorts) for Sephardim fleeing an Inquisition which followed them across the Atlantic (that unofficial symbol of Brazil’s national music — the pandeiro — was almost certainly brought to Brazil by these people).
Across the parched savannas of the interior of Brazil’s culturally fecund nordeste/northeast (where wizard Hermeto Pascoal was born in Lagoa da Canoa — Lagoon of the Canoe — and raised in Olho d’Águia — Eye of the Eagle), much of Brazil’s aboriginal population was absorbed into a caboclo/quilombola culture punctuated by the Star of David.
Three cultures — from three continents — running for their lives, their confluence forming an unprecedented fourth. Pandeirista on the roof.
That's where this Matrix begins:
Wolfram MathWorld
The idea is simple, powerful, and egalitarian: To propagate for them, the Matrix must propagate for all. Most in the world are within six degrees of us. The concept of a "small world" network (see Wolfram above) applies here, placing artists from the Recôncavo and the sertão, from Salvador... from Brooklyn, Berlin and Mombassa... musicians, writers, filmmakers... clicks (recommendations) away from their peers worldwide.
Recent Visitors Map
Great culture is great power.
And in a small world great things are possible.
Alicia Svigals
"Thanks, this is a brilliant idea!!"
—Alicia Svigals (NEW YORK CITY): Apotheosis of klezmer violinists
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers (BOSTON): Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory ... Former personal recording engineer for Prince; "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"
"Dear Sparrow, Many thanks for this – I am touched!"
—Julian Lloyd Webber (LONDON): Premier cellist in UK; brother of Andrew (Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar, Cats, Phantom of the Opera...)
"This is super impressive work ! Congratulations ! Thanks for including me :)))"
—Clarice Assad (RIO DE JANEIRO/CHICAGO): Pianist and composer with works performed by Yo Yo Ma and orchestras around the world
"We appreciate you including Kamasi in the matrix, Sparrow."
—Banch Abegaze (LOS ANGELES): manager, Kamasi Washington
"Thanks! It looks great!....I didn't write 'Cantaloupe Island' though...Herbie Hancock did! Great Page though, well done! best, Randy"
"Very nice! Thank you for this. Warmest regards and wishing much success for the project! Matt"
—Son of Jimmy Garrison (bass for John Coltrane, Bill Evans...); plays with Herbie Hancock and other greats...
I opened the shop in Salvador, Bahia in 2005 in order to create an outlet to the wider world for magnificent Brazilian musicians.
David Dye & Kim Junod for NPR found us (above), and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (he's a huge jazz fan), David Byrne, Oscar Castro-Neves... Spike Lee walked past the place while I was sitting on the stoop across the street drinking beer and listening to samba from the speaker in the window...
But we weren't exactly easy for the world-at-large to get to. So in order to extend the place's ethos I transformed the site associated with it into a network wherein Brazilian musicians I knew would recommend other Brazilian musicians, who would recommend others...
And as I anticipated, the chalky hand of God-as-mathematician intervened: In human society — per the small-world phenomenon — most of the billions of us on earth are within some 6 or fewer degrees of each other. Likewise, within a network of interlinked artists as I've described above, most of these artists will in the same manner be at most a handful of steps away from each other.
So then, all that's necessary to put the Brazilians within possible purview of the wide wide world is to include them among a wide wide range of artists around that world.
If, for example, Quincy Jones is inside the matrix, then anybody on his page — whether they be accessing from a campus in L.A., a pub in Dublin, a shebeen in Cape Town, a tent in Mongolia — will be close, transitable steps away from Raymundo Sodré, even if they know nothing of Brazil and are unaware that Sodré sings/dances upon this planet. Sodré, having been knocked from the perch of fame and ground into anonymity by Brazil's dictatorship, has now the alternative of access to the world-at-large via recourse to the vast potential of network theory.
...to the degree that other artists et al — writers, researchers, filmmakers, painters, choreographers...everywhere — do also. Artificial intelligence not required. Real intelligence, yes.
Years ago in NYC (I've lived here in Brazil for 32 years now) I "rescued" unpaid royalties (performance & mechanical) for artists/composers including Barbra Streisand, Aretha Franklin, Mongo Santamaria, Jim Hall, Clement "Coxsone" Dodd (for his rights in Bob Marley compositions; Clement was Bob's first producer), Led Zeppelin, Ray Barretto, Philip Glass and many others. Aretha called me out of the blue vis-à-vis money owed by Atlantic Records. Allen Klein (managed The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Ray Charles) called about money due the estate of Sam Cooke. Jerry Ragovoy (Time Is On My Side, Piece of My Heart) called just to see if he had any unpaid money floating around out there (the royalty world was a shark-filled jungle, to mangle metaphors, and I doubt it's changed).
But the pertinent client (and friend) in the present context is Earl "Speedo" Carroll, of The Cadillacs. Earl went from doo-wopping on Harlem streetcorners to chart-topping success to working as a custodian at PS 87 elementary school on the west side of Manhattan. Through all of this he never lost what made him great.
Greatness and fame are too often conflated. The former should be accessible independently of the latter.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay (they paid).
Matrix founding creators are behind "one of 10 of the best (radios) around the world", per The Guardian.
Across the creative universe... For another list, reload page.
This list is random, and incomplete. Reload the page for another list.
For a complete list of everybody inside, tap TOTAL below:
TOTAL
Susan Rogers
Julian Lloyd Webber
Clarice Assad
Kamasi Washington
Randy Brecker
Matt Garrison
RÁDIO MATRIX