Instead Draws Upon a Much More Generic Sort of Free-Jazz Tenor Saxophone Musical Vocabulary
Funding for the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program NEA Jazz Master interview was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts. GEORGE AVAKIAN NEA JAZZ MASTER (2010) Interviewee: George Avakian (March 15, 1919 – November 22, 2017) Interviewer: Ann Sneed with recording engineer Julie Burstein Date: September 28, 1993 Repository: Archives Center, National Museum of American History Description: Transcript, 112 pp. Sneed: I’m Ann Sneed. We are in Riverdale. We’re interviewing George Avakian. There’s so many things to say about you, I’m just going to say George Avakian and ask you first, why jazz? Avakian: I think it happened because I was born abroad, and among the things that came into my consciousness as I was growing up was American popular music, and then it drifted in the direction of jazz through popular dance bands, such as the Casa Loma Orchestra, which I heard about through the guys who were hanging around the home of our neighbor at Greenwood Lake, which is where we went in the summers. We had a house on the lake. Our next-door neighbors had two daughters, one of whom was my age and very pretty, Dorothy Caulfield, who incidentally is responsible for Holden Caulfield’s last name, because J. D. Salinger got to know her and was very fond of her, named Holden after her family name. These boys came from the Teaneck area of New Jersey. So it was a short drive to Greenwood Lake on a straight line between New York and New Jersey. They had a dance band, the usual nine pieces: three brass, three saxophones, three rhythm.
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