Jazz Appreciation Month rolls on, and we turn to conversations from a while back worth remembering Pittsburgh Jazz stars - including some you may not know about.
We turn to the 2019 ceremony granting the BNY Mellon jazz live Legacy Award to Joe Negri, with Joe introduced by piano master Max Leake - and share a recently discovered Joe Negri composition that Max Leake put on his recent two-CD set, Threads.
Max Leake, Roger Humphries, Joe Negri and Terri Bell at the 2019 JazzLive Legacy Awards
In a chat we had with Tom Roberts back in 2024, with COVID-19 mostly in the rear-view mirror, 2024 looked to be part of a new “roaring 20’s” of a sort. Back in the 1920’s, as the economy was coming back from the Great War and the 1918 Flu pandemic, the music scene in Pittsburgh was a part of that “roar.”
Yet, many of the artists from that era in Pittsburgh are not remembered, today.
Pianist and historian Tom Roberts is working to lift some covers on that forgetting - and finding new artists from 100 years ago that deserve to be heard.
We visited with Tom about that - including Pittsburgh natives like Babe and Frank Russin, and Hildred and Frank “Fat man” Humphries (uncles of Pittsburgh drumming icon and mentor Roger Humphries).
And we also turn to the conversation we had with Pittsburgh’s Jeff Goldblum - famous movie star and rising piano jazz player with his “Midred Snitzer Orchestra - returning to Pittsburgh to play at Heinz Hall in October.
The Scene - Thursday night at 6, Friday and Saturday at noon, Sunday at 5 on WZUM.
Babe Russin
