Nathaniel Catchpole
May-10th-2003, 12:36 PM
Dear jazz musicians, the deadline to be included in Lewis Porter's Jazz Encyclopedia has been extended until April 1, 2003. [I saw elsewhere that it's been extended to May 15th. I ain't sending nothin', but I'm sure other people might want to]
A CALL TO ALL JAZZ MUSICIANS WORLDWIDE TO BE INCLUDED IN A NEW ENCYCLOPEDIA EDITED BY LEWIS PORTER--I'M NOW ACCEPTING INFO THROUGH APRIL 1, 2003!!
To all jazz musicians worldwide! Most of you know of my Coltrane bio and other books. Now I've signed a contract with Routledge to assemble an encyclopedia of ALL currently active jazz musicians, young and old, from the local players to the "big names," in every style and in EVERY country. For the first time, each artist will have a great deal of control over his or her biography entry, and contact information will be included! The book will also have photos, and several useful indexes. Even if you are a big name, I very much appreciate your response (through your manager if you wish) because some of the info needed is not in reference sources.
I can accept information BY EMAIL ONLY, at Lrpjazz@aol.com. You can also send one small photo there if you wish, and we will consider including it, but anything larger than 1mb must be "snailmailed" on disk or CD--use the address below. Please do not just send me your website address, as I can't visit thousands of web sites. You can easily copy the text from the website and paste it into an email. Basically I need:
1. Your current bio, including your instrument. Please add your full birth name, and your exact date and place of birth. If you didn't grow up where you were born, add where you mainly grew up. Also add who you studied with and where and when, and awards you have won (if not already in your bio).
2. A little family history--just the names and birth/death years of parents and brothers and sisters is enough, but say more if you wish (you may include your spouse/partner and kids too). If any of them are musicians, say so.
3. Your documented performances (including CD, LP, radio, TV, film, and unissued items) with year of recording for each item. A simple format is fine--for your releases as a leader just list the title and year, for ex., A Love Supreme (1964); for your work as a sideperson please list the leader first, for example, Miles Davis: Kind of Blue (1959). If you are listing unissued items, you may do this in condensed form; for ex., "1974-6; about 20 hours of private tapes from NYC loft concerts."
4. Your bibliography (articles and books and websites about you, and ones you have written). Concentrate on feature articles and interviews rather than short CD reviews.
5. The contact information that you would like to have listed in the book.
Send your info NOW--the deadline has been extended to April 1, 2003. After a few days I will email you back to thank you and I will say if I need anything more.
SAVE YOUR RESPONSES in case my hard drive and backups somehow get screwed up!
Info will be accepted in English only--but if your English is not perfect, send it anyway and I will edit it. You can send me the info, and I'll write your entry from that, or you can write up your own entry on yourself and send that to me. Either way, I will edit it and email it back to you in the summer of 2003 for you to give it a final check, update, etc.
Please note that I do reserve the right to decide who will be included. Also, it is possible that the publisher will make some cuts. But my agreement with them at present is to include as many people as possible. The book should be out around the summer of 2004. It will be an expensive book and the publisher will NOT give out free books to the thousands of musicians who will be included, I'm sorry to say.
More details are below which may answer some of your questions, as well as a sample bio entry that you may use as a model. Thanks for helping me to do the best job on your biography!
Lewis Porter
Lrpjazz@aol.com
Professor Lewis Porter
Bradley Hall 254
Rutgers University
Newark NJ, USA, 07102
NOTE ABOUT BAKER'S: You might remember that I was assembling an encyclopedia for Baker's a few years ago. When the publisher was sold, that was drastically truncated and folded into a general music encyclopedia. So this is in a sense the "replacement" for that.
NOTE ABOUT PHOTOS: Of course you can just send a photo by mail. Black and white is best for books, but color is fine too. If you use email, or if you mail it on a disk or CD, use JPEG (or TIFF). Ideally it should be at least 300 DPI at full size--at least 4 X 5 inches (otherwise, it will reproduce like a postage stamp!). But please just send what you have--the publisher will get back to you if they decide to use it and if they need a different format. REMEMBER, YOU MUST USE SNAIL MAIL FOR ITEMS LARGER THAN 1MB. If it is necessary to credit the photographer please tell me who to credit. By your sending me the photo, I assume I have your permission to print it in the book. If the photographer's permission is also needed, or a fee must be paid to the photographer, let me know, but in that case I probably won't be able to use it.
NOTE ABOUT TEXT: The best method for text is to simply paste all info into the email itself. If you are sending several attachments, they will come through better if you send several emails with ONE attachment per email. Please DO NOT attach info that is already in the email--I can get it from the email. I can use Zip, Stuffit, etc. and most Mac and PC formats.
FINALLY, HERE IS THE SAMPLE ENTRY FOR YOU TO USE AS A MODEL: Please note, the name Robert in parentheses indicates that my middle name is Robert, but that I don't use it professionally:
----------- ** SAMPLE ENTRY START ** --------------
Porter, Lewis (Robert), pianist, educator, author; b. Scranton, PA, May 14, 1951. While he was an infant his family moved to Minn., MN, and then to North Decatur, GA (his parents divorced there in 1955). In Feb. 1958 his mother (born Carol Reiss, 1924) and two brothers (Spence, b. 1948; Gilbert, b. 1953) moved to the Bronx, in NYC, where they remained. His father, Arthur Portnoff (1924-2000) changed the family name to Porter ca. 1952. Lewis had violin lessons from about age 10-12, then taught himself piano, becoming dedicated to jazz from about the age of 14, and eventually obtaining one year of lessons at the Eastman School of Music while in college at the University of Rochester (BA in psychology, 1972), where he also played in a combo class led by Chuck Mangione and began performing gigs on campus. He took a second year of lessons with classical recitalist Vivian Taylor while he was teaching part-time at Tufts University (he was the first faculty director of its student-led jazz band and directed a major jazz festival there in the early 1980s) and completing his MA in Music Theory there (1977-79) under his mentor, composer T.J. Anderson. He also earned an M.Ed. in Counseling at Northeastern U. in 1976. He received a PhD in Musicology from Brandeis University in 1983, having founded the jazz ensemble there while he continued to teach, now full-time, at Tufts, before moving in the fall of 1986 to Rutgers University in Newark, NJ, where he has remained. In the mid-90s he studied piano for a third year, with Andy LaVerne. He also had about six months of training each on saxophone and later with Keith Copeland on drums, performing extensively on the saxophone between about 1974 and 1994, and a few voice lessons (he sometimes scats in concert).
Dr. Porter founded the Master's program in Jazz History and Research at Rutgers-Newark in the fall of 1997. Well known as an author and scholar, in 2002 he began editing a series of books on jazz for the University of Michigan press. He continues to advise other publishers about books they are considering. He was one of five people nominated for a Grammy in 1996 for their role in producing the boxed set of Coltrane's Atlantic Recordings (under Best Historical Reissue). Other awards include a New Jersey Governor's Fellowship in the Humanities, 1989-1990; a New Jersey Department of Higher Education Grant to teach college jazz educators, summer 1988, Rutgers-Newark; and a Massachusetts Council On The Arts and Humanities Grant to teach high school jazz educators, summer 1985, Tufts U. He was a coauthor with Chris Rich on two Massachusetts Council On The Arts and Humanities grants to commision new works from Ornette Coleman (1987) and Butch Morris (1988) through Tufts University.
He has remained active as a pianist, and, increasingly, as a composer. He has performed in a variety of styles, with Dan Faulk, Kenny Wessel, Harvie Swartz, Don Friedman, Yoron Israel, Alan Dawson, Gregg Bendian, in solo "classical improvisation" recitals, with the Indian Jazz Ensemble (which he founded in order to perform with four faculty members of the Ali Akbar Khan school in San Francisco, 1973), and others. He has spoken and performed at colleges (Berklee, North Texas, many others), jazz clubs (Birdland, Knitting Factory, others), and radio stations in the U.S., Denmark, Italy, Germany, and England. His first CD, Second Voyage, was issued on the Swiss label Altrisuoni in 2002. His children are Rachel (b.1991) and Matthew (b.1987); in 2000 he married for the second time, to Karen Mikhael (now Porter).
RECORDINGS, BROADCASTS, AND FILMS:
-Second Voyage, with guest Dave Liebman (2000); Matt Glaser: Play, Fiddle, Play (1986).
-About 30 unissued tapes and three videotapes of performances from ca. 1970 on, with George Garzone, David Kikoski, Gerry Hemingway, Tom Varner, Jimmy Lyons, Alan Dawson, Terri Lyne Carrington, Joe Cohn, Don Friedman, Herb Pomeroy, Frank Lowe, Butch Morris, Herb Pomeroy, and others.
-Live radio performances on WBRS-FM (Brandeis U.; ca. 1983), WNYC-FM (Manhattan; 1995) and WBGO-FM (Newark, NJ; 2002).
-Numerous radio interviews across the U.S. and in England and Denmark; numerous interview segments as part of radio documentaries in the U.S. (NPR, All Things Considered, Jazz Profiles, etc.) and England (BBC).
-Interviews on several New Jersey TV stations and on BET TV.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Works by Porter:
Jazz: A Century of Change (anthology, plus new essays; Schirmer,1997)
John Coltrane: His Life and Music (winner of 1999 Jazz Research Award from the Association of Recorded Sound Collections; U of Michigan Press, 1998)
Jazz: From Its Origins to the Present, by Porter and Michael Ullman, with Ed Hazell (Prentice-Hall, 1992; was briefly available on CD-ROM)
A Lester Young Reader (anthology edited by Porter; Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991)
Lester Young (Twayne, 1985; reprinted U of Michigan, 2003)
John Coltrane: A Discography and Musical Biography, by Yasuhiro Fujioka with
Lewis Porter and Yoh-Ichi Hamada (Scarecrow Press, 1995)
Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians (includes about 1000 short biographies by Porter; Gale Publications, 2000)
New Grove Dictionary of Jazz (includes 15 articles by Porter; MacMillan, 2001)
"The 'Blues Connotation' in Ornette Coleman's MusicAnd Some General Thoughts on the Relation of Blues to Jazz," in Annual Review of Jazz Studies 7, 1996.
"Jazz In American Education," in College Music Symposium 29, 1989; reprinted in Crescendo International (London), August, September 1989.
"Some Problems In Jazz Research," in Black Music Research Journal 8/2 (Fall 1988)
"John Coltrane's 'A Love Supreme': Jazz Improvisation as Composition," in Journal of The American Musicological Society 38/3 (1985).
"The Early Style of Lester Young," in The Black Perspective In Music, 9/1, (Spring 1981).
"She Wiped All The Men Out: A Re-Evaluation of Women Instrumentalists and Composers In Jazz," in Music Educators Journal, September and October 1984.
"An Historical Survey of Jazz Drumming Styles," in Percussive Notes, June and October 1982.
Numerous other short publications including book and LP/CD reviews from 1978 onward in Annual Review of Jazz Studies (which he coedited for a few years), Black Perspective In Music (for which he was jazz editor), American Record Guide, Coda, Signal to Noise, and elsewhere.
Works About Porter or Citing Him Extensively (omitting numerous reviews of his work):
"A Master's Degree in Jazz Studies," by Terry Ripmaster, in Jersey Jazz, March 2001.
"Jazz in the Catbird Seat: It Wasn't Always So," by Ben Ratliff, New York Times, Jan. 6, 2001, B9, B11.
"Lewis Porter," in The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, second edition (2001)
"Lewis Porter," in Contemporary Authors (Gale Publishing, 2000)
George Kanzler, "Author Unearths New Details About Life Of John Coltrane,"
Newark Star-Ledger, July 12, 1998
Kijun Lee, "Lewis Porter Interview," Jazz Hipster (Korea), August/Sept. 1998
Douglas Frank, Rutgers Focus, Lewis Porter: Jazzman to the Roots,EJanuary 24, 1998.
http://www.allaboutjazz.com/iviews/lporter.htm (long interview, 1999)
http://www.furious.com/perfect (long interview, 1998)
CONTACT INFORMATION:
Lrpjazz@aol.com
http://www.altrisuoni.com/artist.php?op=View&id=75
973-353-5600, ext. 30 (Rutgers U in Newark, NJ)
----------- ** SAMPLE ENTRY END ** --------------
A CALL TO ALL JAZZ MUSICIANS WORLDWIDE TO BE INCLUDED IN A NEW ENCYCLOPEDIA EDITED BY LEWIS PORTER--I'M NOW ACCEPTING INFO THROUGH APRIL 1, 2003!!
To all jazz musicians worldwide! Most of you know of my Coltrane bio and other books. Now I've signed a contract with Routledge to assemble an encyclopedia of ALL currently active jazz musicians, young and old, from the local players to the "big names," in every style and in EVERY country. For the first time, each artist will have a great deal of control over his or her biography entry, and contact information will be included! The book will also have photos, and several useful indexes. Even if you are a big name, I very much appreciate your response (through your manager if you wish) because some of the info needed is not in reference sources.
I can accept information BY EMAIL ONLY, at Lrpjazz@aol.com. You can also send one small photo there if you wish, and we will consider including it, but anything larger than 1mb must be "snailmailed" on disk or CD--use the address below. Please do not just send me your website address, as I can't visit thousands of web sites. You can easily copy the text from the website and paste it into an email. Basically I need:
1. Your current bio, including your instrument. Please add your full birth name, and your exact date and place of birth. If you didn't grow up where you were born, add where you mainly grew up. Also add who you studied with and where and when, and awards you have won (if not already in your bio).
2. A little family history--just the names and birth/death years of parents and brothers and sisters is enough, but say more if you wish (you may include your spouse/partner and kids too). If any of them are musicians, say so.
3. Your documented performances (including CD, LP, radio, TV, film, and unissued items) with year of recording for each item. A simple format is fine--for your releases as a leader just list the title and year, for ex., A Love Supreme (1964); for your work as a sideperson please list the leader first, for example, Miles Davis: Kind of Blue (1959). If you are listing unissued items, you may do this in condensed form; for ex., "1974-6; about 20 hours of private tapes from NYC loft concerts."
4. Your bibliography (articles and books and websites about you, and ones you have written). Concentrate on feature articles and interviews rather than short CD reviews.
5. The contact information that you would like to have listed in the book.
Send your info NOW--the deadline has been extended to April 1, 2003. After a few days I will email you back to thank you and I will say if I need anything more.
SAVE YOUR RESPONSES in case my hard drive and backups somehow get screwed up!
Info will be accepted in English only--but if your English is not perfect, send it anyway and I will edit it. You can send me the info, and I'll write your entry from that, or you can write up your own entry on yourself and send that to me. Either way, I will edit it and email it back to you in the summer of 2003 for you to give it a final check, update, etc.
Please note that I do reserve the right to decide who will be included. Also, it is possible that the publisher will make some cuts. But my agreement with them at present is to include as many people as possible. The book should be out around the summer of 2004. It will be an expensive book and the publisher will NOT give out free books to the thousands of musicians who will be included, I'm sorry to say.
More details are below which may answer some of your questions, as well as a sample bio entry that you may use as a model. Thanks for helping me to do the best job on your biography!
Lewis Porter
Lrpjazz@aol.com
Professor Lewis Porter
Bradley Hall 254
Rutgers University
Newark NJ, USA, 07102
NOTE ABOUT BAKER'S: You might remember that I was assembling an encyclopedia for Baker's a few years ago. When the publisher was sold, that was drastically truncated and folded into a general music encyclopedia. So this is in a sense the "replacement" for that.
NOTE ABOUT PHOTOS: Of course you can just send a photo by mail. Black and white is best for books, but color is fine too. If you use email, or if you mail it on a disk or CD, use JPEG (or TIFF). Ideally it should be at least 300 DPI at full size--at least 4 X 5 inches (otherwise, it will reproduce like a postage stamp!). But please just send what you have--the publisher will get back to you if they decide to use it and if they need a different format. REMEMBER, YOU MUST USE SNAIL MAIL FOR ITEMS LARGER THAN 1MB. If it is necessary to credit the photographer please tell me who to credit. By your sending me the photo, I assume I have your permission to print it in the book. If the photographer's permission is also needed, or a fee must be paid to the photographer, let me know, but in that case I probably won't be able to use it.
NOTE ABOUT TEXT: The best method for text is to simply paste all info into the email itself. If you are sending several attachments, they will come through better if you send several emails with ONE attachment per email. Please DO NOT attach info that is already in the email--I can get it from the email. I can use Zip, Stuffit, etc. and most Mac and PC formats.
FINALLY, HERE IS THE SAMPLE ENTRY FOR YOU TO USE AS A MODEL: Please note, the name Robert in parentheses indicates that my middle name is Robert, but that I don't use it professionally:
----------- ** SAMPLE ENTRY START ** --------------
Porter, Lewis (Robert), pianist, educator, author; b. Scranton, PA, May 14, 1951. While he was an infant his family moved to Minn., MN, and then to North Decatur, GA (his parents divorced there in 1955). In Feb. 1958 his mother (born Carol Reiss, 1924) and two brothers (Spence, b. 1948; Gilbert, b. 1953) moved to the Bronx, in NYC, where they remained. His father, Arthur Portnoff (1924-2000) changed the family name to Porter ca. 1952. Lewis had violin lessons from about age 10-12, then taught himself piano, becoming dedicated to jazz from about the age of 14, and eventually obtaining one year of lessons at the Eastman School of Music while in college at the University of Rochester (BA in psychology, 1972), where he also played in a combo class led by Chuck Mangione and began performing gigs on campus. He took a second year of lessons with classical recitalist Vivian Taylor while he was teaching part-time at Tufts University (he was the first faculty director of its student-led jazz band and directed a major jazz festival there in the early 1980s) and completing his MA in Music Theory there (1977-79) under his mentor, composer T.J. Anderson. He also earned an M.Ed. in Counseling at Northeastern U. in 1976. He received a PhD in Musicology from Brandeis University in 1983, having founded the jazz ensemble there while he continued to teach, now full-time, at Tufts, before moving in the fall of 1986 to Rutgers University in Newark, NJ, where he has remained. In the mid-90s he studied piano for a third year, with Andy LaVerne. He also had about six months of training each on saxophone and later with Keith Copeland on drums, performing extensively on the saxophone between about 1974 and 1994, and a few voice lessons (he sometimes scats in concert).
Dr. Porter founded the Master's program in Jazz History and Research at Rutgers-Newark in the fall of 1997. Well known as an author and scholar, in 2002 he began editing a series of books on jazz for the University of Michigan press. He continues to advise other publishers about books they are considering. He was one of five people nominated for a Grammy in 1996 for their role in producing the boxed set of Coltrane's Atlantic Recordings (under Best Historical Reissue). Other awards include a New Jersey Governor's Fellowship in the Humanities, 1989-1990; a New Jersey Department of Higher Education Grant to teach college jazz educators, summer 1988, Rutgers-Newark; and a Massachusetts Council On The Arts and Humanities Grant to teach high school jazz educators, summer 1985, Tufts U. He was a coauthor with Chris Rich on two Massachusetts Council On The Arts and Humanities grants to commision new works from Ornette Coleman (1987) and Butch Morris (1988) through Tufts University.
He has remained active as a pianist, and, increasingly, as a composer. He has performed in a variety of styles, with Dan Faulk, Kenny Wessel, Harvie Swartz, Don Friedman, Yoron Israel, Alan Dawson, Gregg Bendian, in solo "classical improvisation" recitals, with the Indian Jazz Ensemble (which he founded in order to perform with four faculty members of the Ali Akbar Khan school in San Francisco, 1973), and others. He has spoken and performed at colleges (Berklee, North Texas, many others), jazz clubs (Birdland, Knitting Factory, others), and radio stations in the U.S., Denmark, Italy, Germany, and England. His first CD, Second Voyage, was issued on the Swiss label Altrisuoni in 2002. His children are Rachel (b.1991) and Matthew (b.1987); in 2000 he married for the second time, to Karen Mikhael (now Porter).
RECORDINGS, BROADCASTS, AND FILMS:
-Second Voyage, with guest Dave Liebman (2000); Matt Glaser: Play, Fiddle, Play (1986).
-About 30 unissued tapes and three videotapes of performances from ca. 1970 on, with George Garzone, David Kikoski, Gerry Hemingway, Tom Varner, Jimmy Lyons, Alan Dawson, Terri Lyne Carrington, Joe Cohn, Don Friedman, Herb Pomeroy, Frank Lowe, Butch Morris, Herb Pomeroy, and others.
-Live radio performances on WBRS-FM (Brandeis U.; ca. 1983), WNYC-FM (Manhattan; 1995) and WBGO-FM (Newark, NJ; 2002).
-Numerous radio interviews across the U.S. and in England and Denmark; numerous interview segments as part of radio documentaries in the U.S. (NPR, All Things Considered, Jazz Profiles, etc.) and England (BBC).
-Interviews on several New Jersey TV stations and on BET TV.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Works by Porter:
Jazz: A Century of Change (anthology, plus new essays; Schirmer,1997)
John Coltrane: His Life and Music (winner of 1999 Jazz Research Award from the Association of Recorded Sound Collections; U of Michigan Press, 1998)
Jazz: From Its Origins to the Present, by Porter and Michael Ullman, with Ed Hazell (Prentice-Hall, 1992; was briefly available on CD-ROM)
A Lester Young Reader (anthology edited by Porter; Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991)
Lester Young (Twayne, 1985; reprinted U of Michigan, 2003)
John Coltrane: A Discography and Musical Biography, by Yasuhiro Fujioka with
Lewis Porter and Yoh-Ichi Hamada (Scarecrow Press, 1995)
Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians (includes about 1000 short biographies by Porter; Gale Publications, 2000)
New Grove Dictionary of Jazz (includes 15 articles by Porter; MacMillan, 2001)
"The 'Blues Connotation' in Ornette Coleman's MusicAnd Some General Thoughts on the Relation of Blues to Jazz," in Annual Review of Jazz Studies 7, 1996.
"Jazz In American Education," in College Music Symposium 29, 1989; reprinted in Crescendo International (London), August, September 1989.
"Some Problems In Jazz Research," in Black Music Research Journal 8/2 (Fall 1988)
"John Coltrane's 'A Love Supreme': Jazz Improvisation as Composition," in Journal of The American Musicological Society 38/3 (1985).
"The Early Style of Lester Young," in The Black Perspective In Music, 9/1, (Spring 1981).
"She Wiped All The Men Out: A Re-Evaluation of Women Instrumentalists and Composers In Jazz," in Music Educators Journal, September and October 1984.
"An Historical Survey of Jazz Drumming Styles," in Percussive Notes, June and October 1982.
Numerous other short publications including book and LP/CD reviews from 1978 onward in Annual Review of Jazz Studies (which he coedited for a few years), Black Perspective In Music (for which he was jazz editor), American Record Guide, Coda, Signal to Noise, and elsewhere.
Works About Porter or Citing Him Extensively (omitting numerous reviews of his work):
"A Master's Degree in Jazz Studies," by Terry Ripmaster, in Jersey Jazz, March 2001.
"Jazz in the Catbird Seat: It Wasn't Always So," by Ben Ratliff, New York Times, Jan. 6, 2001, B9, B11.
"Lewis Porter," in The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, second edition (2001)
"Lewis Porter," in Contemporary Authors (Gale Publishing, 2000)
George Kanzler, "Author Unearths New Details About Life Of John Coltrane,"
Newark Star-Ledger, July 12, 1998
Kijun Lee, "Lewis Porter Interview," Jazz Hipster (Korea), August/Sept. 1998
Douglas Frank, Rutgers Focus, Lewis Porter: Jazzman to the Roots,EJanuary 24, 1998.
http://www.allaboutjazz.com/iviews/lporter.htm (long interview, 1999)
http://www.furious.com/perfect (long interview, 1998)
CONTACT INFORMATION:
Lrpjazz@aol.com
http://www.altrisuoni.com/artist.php?op=View&id=75
973-353-5600, ext. 30 (Rutgers U in Newark, NJ)
----------- ** SAMPLE ENTRY END ** --------------