Category: News

Bravo!!! Kennedy Center To Honor Sonny Rollins

4 comments

Good news for regular readers of Jazz Collector and for the jazz world at large. The Kennedy Center has announced its 2011 winners of the Kennedy Center Honors awards and guess what: Sonny Rollins is one of the five honorees! We say this is good news for Jazz Collector because we’ve been vocal advocates that Sonny needed to be honored as the greatest living jazz artist, and it’s so nice to see that we may have had even the most marginal of impacts just by mentioning it in the first place. It’s great for the jazz world because we will now get to see our music and, in particular, the music of Sonny, celebrated as a prime time television event for all to see. We’ll post more on this story as we let it all sink in, but we wanted to share the information just now, as we heard it. Congratulations to Sonny, of course, for an honor that is well-deserved and long overdue.

Sonny Rollins Awarded National Medal of Arts

One comment

Thanks to Don-Lucky for the heads-up that Sonny Rollins is being awarded today with  the National Medal of Arts — the highest award given to artists and arts patrons by the United States Government. I am doubly pleased to see that Sonny is being honored along with James Taylor, one of my all time-favorite artists outside of the jazz sphere. On Sonny’s official Web site, this is what he had to say: “I’m very happy that jazz, the greatest American music, is being recognized through this honor, and I’m grateful to accept this award on behalf of the gods of our music.”

This is the citation read at the ceremony:

“Sonny Rollins for his contributions to American jazz music. Widely recognized as one of the most important and influential jazz musicians of the post-bebop era, Mr. Rollins’ melodic sensibilities, playing style, and solos have delighted audiences and influenced generations of musicians for over 50 years.”

Here are some details about the honor, as well as past jazz winners: Read more

Kennedy Center Honors: Still No Sonny!

9 comments

I just did that post on Sonny Rollins a few moments ago and, in looking through the archives I found this piece bemoaning the fact that the Kennedy Center Honors last year once again failed to honor Sonny: Kennedy Center Honors: Where’s Sonny? So just for the hell of it, I went over to the site for the Kennedy Center Honors and it turns out they just announced this year’s recipients. And guess what? Still no Sonny. I, for one, believe this is an outrage. Sonny has not only been a leader and innovator in jazz for more than 60 years, he is a link to Bird and Dizzy and the bop era and he is still playing as well as ever. His influence is really unparalleled and he deserves the kind of broad recognition and acknowledgement that goes with this honor. The honorees this year are Paul McCartney, Oprah Winfrey, Merle Haggard, Jerry Herman and Bill T. Jones. Let’s see if we can somehow use the power of the Jazz Collector community to see if we can push for Sonny to be honored next year. I think this would be a worthy effort, don’t you?

Rare Jazz Rediscovered and Donated

One comment

CeeDee beat me to it, but there’s an interesting article in today’s New York Times: Great Jazz, Long Unheard, Is Rediscovered. It is the story of an audio engineer named William Savory, who recorded live radio broadcasts in the late 1930s. What is particularly compelling is that he used 12-inch and 16-inch disks and even used the 33-1/3 RPM format so he could record extended performances and solos that were much longer than the standard three minutes or so that were captured at the time on  a 78. The music has been donated to the National Jazz Museum in Harlem and presumably will make its way to the public, although there are questions raised in the article about copyright and ownership. Among some of the performances mentioned are a live version of Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit” and a six-minute Coleman Hawkins solo on “Body and Soul” It’s worth a read. The article includes audio clips.

Site Update, One More Time

3 comments

OK, in response to some of your suggestions, we’ve made a slight adjustment on the site. On the Reader Forum, the comments are listed with the most recent on top and the oldest below. This will simplify searches and make it easier for those of you using portable devices. On all of the other items, the comments will be listed sequentially, with the most recent on the bottom. This is to satisfy my belief that the comments flow better from top to bottom and, when read sequentially, help tell a bigger story than what I may have posted originally. We’re also looking into a Forum plug-in for WordPress, so if any of you have seen ones you like elsewhere, just let us know.

A Slight Site Change

4 comments

Before I get into my theory or theories on some of the lower prices on eBay for mid-tier collectibles, which I will do later this morning, let me inform you of a recent slight change we’ve made to the Jazz Collector site. After we started the Reader Forum a couple of months ago, we set up the site so that comments would appear in a different order, with the most recent on top. We did this to make it easier to use the Reader Forum without having to scroll through to the bottom. However, we spent some time on the site last night, just perusing old articles and it all seemed a bit out of synch and counter-intuitive. When you look at the articles, as well as the Reader Forum, there’s a certain flow wherein the order of the postings is part of telling the entire story. Anyway, we decided to go back to showing the comments in the order they were posted, top to bottom, the way it is handled on most Web sites. It may be a little bit more hassle reading the Reader Forum, but for me, as a reader, it enhances the overall storytelling.

Updating & Analyzing the Jazz Vinyl Fraud

3 comments

It’s been a few weeks since we’ve heard anything new on the Nautiluso Jazz Vinyl Fraud. We’ll place a call into eBay after the holiday weekend to see if they have more information, but there has been no new feedback on Nautiluso and nothing from the Berlin police about any arrests. We imagine eBay would like to put this to rest and has probably paid off all of the victims. One of our readers and loyal commentators, Gregorious, was doing a blog entry on the fraud for The Our Stage Blog and asked us for some comments on the fraud. This is what we said:

“I’m always watching records for the Jazz Collector site. When I saw the group of records that Nautiluso had for that week I was pretty stunned: It was probably the best collection I’d ever seen in one week. I posted an item about it and immediately started getting comments and emails from collectors who

Read more

Putting a Name on the Jazz Vinyl Fraud

7 comments

As Rudolf pointed out in a comment yesterday, Nautiluso, perpetrator of the Jazz Vinyl Fraud of 2009, is no longer a registered user on eBay, so the public information about him is slowly starting to disappear. There was a point at which he had a My World page, but that is gone. You can still see on eBay that he had been a member since June 8, 2003 — in Germany. Personally, I’m not sure he was ever based in Brazil: It’s likely he had an accomplice mail from a Brazil mailing address because he believed it would provide a safe haven. The thing about this guy is, for several years he was probably a legitimate seller and probably used his real name in communicating with customers. I will tell you the name he used: Thomas Lamprecht. If you had any dealings with him, please let us know. What’s also starting to disappear from eBay are

Read more

Nautiluso: More Feedback, No Response From eBay

3 comments

Here’s a quick update on the Nautiluso Fraud:

I contacted media relations at eBay on Monday with a bunch of questions. Still no response. I’ll follow up today. Still trying to find out if they are acknowledging a fraud, if they are pressing charges against the perpetrator and if they are consistently reimbursing victims.

There are two new instances of negative feedback on Nautiluso if you check out his profile here. These are from a classical buyer from the same auction. He was ripped off to the tune of about $3,400 and says on his feedback that eBay refunded his money. So far, everyone we’ve heard from directly has

Read more

1 2 3 4 5 6