Ira Gitler, 90, Jazz Writer/Historian, December 18, 1928, Brooklyn --- February 23, 2019, New York City

Ira Gitler, 90, jazz writer/historian, December 18, 1928, Brooklyn --- February 23, 2019, New York City. Gitler's love of bebop was never more apparent or more stunningly expressed than in his description of Bud Powell's piano playing with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker at the Three Deuces on New York's 52nd Street in 1947. "He hung the audience by its nerve ends," he wrote, "playing music of demonically driven beauty, music of hard, unflinching swing, music of genius." The passage was from Gitler's book, Jazz Masters of the Forties (Macmillan: 1966). "Few writers on jazz," wrote WBGO's Nate Chinen (February 25, 2019), "have ever loomed as large as Ira Gitler." He wrote about jazz for more than 60 years in publications such as JazzTimes, Metronome, and DownBeat (also serving as its associate editor). In addition to Jazz Masters of the Forties, he wrote Swing to Bop: An Oral History of the Transition in Jazz in the 1940s (Oxford University Press: 1985); he followed Leonard Feather as editor of The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz (Horizon Press); and he wrote hundreds of liner notes. As a teenager, Gitler wrote his first article about jazz for his high school newspaper after hearing Gillespie at the Spotlite Club on 52nd Street. His liner note writing began in 1951 when he was working at Prestige Records, and he is remembered for coining the phrase, "sheets of sound" in the notes for John Coltrane's 1958 album, Soultrane. Bob Porter, WBGO announcer and Gitler's successor at Prestige, told Chinen he believes Gitler was "the guy who put bebop into perspective." While Gitler was introduced to jazz at a young age by the swing bands of the '30s and '40s, he became enthralled by the bebop innovations introduced by Gillespie and Parker. While at Prestige, in addition to writing liner notes, he produced recording sessions for musicians such as Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and Sonny Rollins. His other passion, besides jazz, was hockey. He wrote about it in books such as Make the Team in Ice Hockey (Grosset & Dunlap: 1970) and Blood on the Ice: Hockey's Most Violent Moments (Henry Regnery: 1974). And he formed an amateur hockey team, Gitler's Gorillas, which was written about by George Plimpton in his book, Open Net: A Professional Amateur in the World of Big-Time Hockey (Lyons Press: 1985). In 2000, JazzTimes asked Gitler what would represent a perfect day. His response: "The Mets and Rangers both win on the same day, a great meal in between games, followed by the late set at The Village Vanguard listening to Roy Hargrove." Keyboardist Mike LeDonne recalled, on Facebook, how he was comforted on 9/11 when he inadvertently ran into Gitler on the Upper East Side. "We had a nice chat walking together, and it really helped calm me down. Here was someone I met when I first moved to NYC, and it felt like I was walking with my uncle or something . I may have seen him after that, but that is the memory that will always stick in my mind. The world seems a little emptier without Ira in it." Gitler taught at The New School and Manhattan School of Music, received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1974, and was named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts in 2017, receiving its A.B. Spellman Award for Jazz Advocacy. He also received Lifetime Achievement Awards from the New Jersey Jazz Society and the Jazz Journalists Association. Speaking about his father's career, Gitler's son Fitz told Chinen, "He did it for love, and then somehow turned it into a career. While he's thought of as a writer and an author, his reach was kind of into every place where he could help share that love of his with other people -- to help inform and clarify and evangelize for the music that he loved." In addition to his son, Gitler is survived by his wife ,Mary Jo, a visual artist. ## Author's Note: I was fortunate to be able to include some of Gitler's prose in my book, Jeru's Journey: The Life and Music of Gerry Mulligan (Hal Leonard Books: 2015). Writing in the June 1996 issue of JazzTimes, five months after Mulligan's death, Gitler said Mulligan "always swung, and his introduction of contrapuntal lines was never precious, always organic." Describing a Birdland performance of Mulligan's Concert Jazz Band in a 1964 Down Beat review, Gitler wrote: "If this band cannot work when it wants to, there is something very wrong with the state of music in the United States." .

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