While cleaning out some boxes the other day I came upon an old Hartford Advocate from April 12, 1978. The Jazz, Rock and Pop listings made me wish I could go back in time and catch some of these shows John Zorn and Eugene Chadbourn, Phil Woods, Al DiMeola, Oliver Lake, And Lee Konitz. Unfortunately I had never heard of any of these people in April 1978.
I posted the clipping of Tower of Power mostly because of the Logo art for Jim Koplik and Shelly Finkel. I also included the listing below Lee Konitz because of Fountain Head (sic) and Firefox. Of course the Shaboo ad has Rhode Island’s own Roomful of Blues no doubt still with Duke Robillard on guitar at that time and Connecticut’s Eight to the Bar who also still perform.
One of the things that I do at Jazz New England is to try to dig up some of the regional jazz lore. I grew up in Connecticut and came of age in the mid to late 1970s. I came to love jazz in a large part because there was so much jazz in Hartford, often for free. That and the fact that as WPLR and WHCN turned from early freeform FM to more commercial Album Oriented Rock I listened more and more to WWUH that played Jazz, Fusion and Progressive rock. Even before I was old enough to go to clubs there were the Peace Train and Monday Night Jazz concerts in Bushnell park and the events at Real Art Ways that all featured world class and cutting edge performers.
I’m a Rhode Islander now and Rhode Island has it’s own jazz culture and history which is suprisingly different from it’s neighbor. In the future I’ll explore it’s idiosyncrasies. Eventually I’d like to include all of New England but for now I’m going to go with what I know.
