From: Lrpjazz@aol.com Date: Thu, 11 Jul 2002 15:46:15 -0400 (EDT) To: Lrpjazz@aol.com Subject: SEND YOUR INFO FOR LEWIS PORTER'S NEW JAZZ ENCYCLOPEDIA! A CALL TO ALL MUSICIANS TO BE INCLUDED IN A NEW ENCYCLOPEDIA EDITED BY LEWIS PORTER!!--please circulate this to EVERY professional jazz player on your mailing lists. NOTE: If this email does not come through clearly, let me know and I'll send a clean copy again. I've just signed a contract with Routledge to assemble an encyclopedia of currently active jazz musicians. My goals are: 1. To include artists who are active in clubs and recording who are in New Grove Encyclopedia etc., as well as MANY HUNDREDS who aren't included in any other encyclopedia. 2. To include artists from EVERY country. 3. To allow the artists a great deal of control over their biography, so that they will feel that they have been represented in the best way. 4. To include website and CONTACT information on every artist (whatever contact info the artist wants me to include), so that this will not only be useful to fans, but will help with gigs and bookings! 5. To include photos of many artists, provided by the artists. 6. To include several useful indexes. BRIEF BACKGROUND: Some of you know that about four years ago I had a contract with Schirmer books to compile the first Baker's jazz encyclopedia. I collected info from many musicians, and included research from my files on many artists. But when Schirmer was sold in early 2000, the new owner, Gale, decided not to do a jazz encyclopedia. Instead they used only about 1000 of my 4,000-plus entries in a new six-volume Baker's encyclopedia of all types of music (including their authoritative classical biographies edited by the late Slonimsky.) Worse, they decided to rush it out and chose from my entries on the basis of which ones were finished--NOT on the basis of who the artists were--so, for example, they printed my entry on Lester Young, but none on Bill Evans. They replaced my unfinished entries on Miles and Louis (both of which had new info) with "stock" entries, and they included entries on some extremely obscure artists simply because they happened to be completed, even though better known artists like Charles Lloyd were omitted. (There were more problems--but that'll do for now!) So, my apologies to those who sent me info and didn't get into Baker's, but this time it appears that everything will be fine! SEND YOUR INFO ASAP (I want to have everything by January 1, 2003 if possible). HERE IS WHAT YOU NEED TO SEND TO ME: Note: EVEN IF YOU SENT ME YOUR INFO FOR BAKER'S, YOU MUST SEND IT AGAIN BECAUSE THE REQUIREMENTS ARE DIFFERENT FOR THIS BOOK, AND SO THAT THE INFO IS UP TO DATE. --Info will be accepted ONLY BY EMAIL to Lrpjazz@aol.com, or on disk: if you don't have email, have a friend email it to me, or mail it to me on a disk or CD! I know that many of you have some of this info on your websites, but it is time consuming for me to visit hundreds of sites and copy the info, so I prefer that you email it. In any case, you will need to add some of the info listed below. --Info will be accepted in ENGLISH only--I will include ALL countries, so if your English is not perfect, send it anyway and I will rewrite it. --You can send your current press bio and/or resume, and text from your website, if you wish. BUT you must also send the following info: 1. Your exact birthdate and birthplace and full birth name (with middle name etc.)--most bios do not include this so please add it. If you didn't grow up where you were born, list where you mainly grew up. 2. Parents' names, years of birth/death, place of birth--if either was a musician, say so. 3. Siblings names, years of birth/death, place of birth--if any is a musician, say so. 4. Give the names of any performers/schools/music teachers who you studied with, and what years you studied with them. 5. List your spouse's and children's names if you wish and if they are musicians. Give birth year for children; optional for spouses. 6. List all your recordings, as leader and as sideperson (say who the leader was), with just the title and year of recording (not the year it was released) for each. For example, for Coltrane's own albums I would just list the title and year, for ex., A Love Supreme (1964); for his albums as a sideperson I will list the leader, for example, Miles Davis: Kind of Blue (1959). 7. List radio and TV broadcasts (NPR, PBS, CBC, BBC, local cable, etc.), and any appearances in films and documentaries. 8. List films and TV shows, etc., for which you have done soundtrack music, but where you don't appear on screen. 9. If possible, list unissued recordings and films/videos of yourself. You may do this in condensed form; for ex., "1974-6; about 20 hours of private tapes from NYC loft concerts." 10. List all magazine and newspaper articles about you (interviews and profiles; not reviews), and all book chapters and books and graduate student dissertations about you. 11. List awards you have won. 12. List all websites that contain interviews or profiles of you. 13. List whatever contact info you wish the public to have: your website(s), email address, phone and fax numbers, and/or mailing address, etc. List only the ones that you would like to be in the book. 14. FINALLY, if you have a photo of yourself that you would like me to consider including, mail or email it to me. If you use email, use JPEG (or TIFF) and it should be at least 300 DPI at full size--at least 4 X 5 inches (otherwise, it will reproduce like a postage stamp!). AS A SAMPLE, at the end of this email is an entry on myself that I will probably include in the book. ONCE I GET YOUR EMAIL, I will edit it and add information from my files. I WILL EMAIL IT BACK TO YOU IN 2003 (probably before May) for you to give it a final check, update, etc.--so you will have a final say on your entry! 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. Thanks for helping me to do the best job on your biography! Lewis Porter 531 Weaver St. Larchmont, NY 10538 Phone: 914-834-6333 Email: Lrpjazz@aol.com P.S. 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: 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, 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 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 on drums, performing extensively on the former 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, summer1988, Rutgers-Newark; and a Massachusetts Council On The Arts and Humanities Grant to teach high school jazz educators, summer1985, 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, 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 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 Music-And 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," January 24, 1998. http://www.allaboutjazz.com/iviews/lporter.htm (long interview, 1999) http://www.furious.com/perfect (long interview, 1998) _________________________________________________________________ Join the worlds largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. http://www.hotmail.com