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Ira Gitler

Ira Gitler is an NEA Jazz Master

“Ira is very honored to receive this award; advocacy is a fitting description of his life in jazz. He has been sharing his love of the music since he wrote about Dizzy Gillespie for his high school paper in 1946.” – Fitz Gitler

Ira Gitler is an American jazz historian, journalist, educator, and author who has written several books about jazz and hundreds of liner notes for jazz recordings. He has also written for many jazz publications, and served as associate editor of DownBeat during the 1960s. In the 1980s and '90s he produced concerts for George Wein’s New York jazz festivals. Gitler also taught jazz history at several colleges and is considered one of the great historians and champions of the music.

From age seven, Gitler immersed himself in the music of the swing bands of the 1930s and early 1940s. In the mid-1940s, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker’s new bebop innovations brought an epiphany. His professional writing career began in 1951, when he was asked to write Prestige Records’ first liner notes for a 10-inch LP of Zoot Sims Swings the Blues. His duties at Prestige in the early 1950s included producing recording sessions with musicians such as Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and Sonny Rollins. In his 1958 liner notes for Soultrane, he coined the term “sheets of sound,” likening John Coltrane’s emerging style to undulating fabric.

In 1954, Gitler began assisting leading jazz authority Leonard Feather in preparing The Encyclopedia of Jazz, one of the first great jazz reference books. He became co-author starting with the 1970s edition, and completed The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz in 1999 after Feather's death in 1994.

Gitler’s own first book was Jazz Masters of the Forties (reissued as The Masters of Bebop in 2001), which examined the bebop revolution by profiling leading players like Gillespie, Parker, and Max Roach, as well as disciples such as Dexter Gordon and J.J. Johnson. Subsidized by a 1974 Guggenheim Fellowship, he wrote Swing to Bop, an oral history weaving ten years of interviews with more than 50 musicians to tell the story of that transition.

Throughout his career Gitler freelanced for U.S. and international jazz publications as well as varied magazines, newspapers, and websites. In addition to jazz, he has a passion for sports and has written several classic books about ice hockey, as well as coaching and playing on an amateur hockey team until age 75.

Gitler’s jazz broadcasts were heard on WNCN and WBAI (New York in the 1960s); KADX (Colorado in 1980s); and Sirius Satellite Radio in the 2000s.

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Video / DVD

Documenary: Ira Gitler Lives!

Documenary: Ira Gitler Lives!

Source: JazzWax by Marc Myers

The late Ira Gitler was the delicatessen of jazz writers. While most jazz scribes of the 1950s and beyond had a fork-and-knife feel to their prose, Ira's liner notes on the backs of albums and his books were meant to be eaten with both hands. He was the New York cabbie, the cop on the beat, the seltzer delivery man and the construction worker. He was jazz's everyman, and his liner notes always came with a pickle on the side. ...

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Obituary

Departures: Andre Previn And Ira Gitler

Departures: Andre Previn And Ira Gitler

Source: Rifftides by Doug Ramsey

This week, music lost two venerable and influential figures. Andre Previn, who distinguished himself as a performer and composer in a wide range of styles and genres, died on Thursday at his home in New York City. He was 89. A gifted pianist whose work as a film composer and orchestrator began before he left high school, Previn won four Academy Awards for his film scores. He performed orchestral works and wrote many pieces played by renowned musicians including the ...

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Obituary

Ira Gitler (1928-2019)

Ira Gitler (1928-2019)

Source: JazzWax by Marc Myers

Ira Gitler, a jazz author, journalist and producer who was a wealth of eyewitness knowledge and whose liner notes starting in the early 1950s appeared on more albums than many of the musicians he wrote about recorded, died on February 23. He was 90. Ira is perhaps best known for writing Leonard Feather's Encyclopedia of Jazz volumes starting in the 1950s. Each musician entry was concise and, at one point, included the addresses of the artists, presumably so that musicians, ...

Festival

Ira Gitler on the Ystad Jazz Festival

Ira Gitler on the Ystad Jazz Festival

Source: JazzWax by Marc Myers

The 2012 Ystad Sweden Jazz Festival opens on Thursday and will feature a wide range of Swedish, European and American jazz artists. Artistic director and pianist Jan Lundgren [pictured above] will be performing, along with Eliane Elias, Billy Harper, Hiromi Uehara and others. On Sunday—the festival's last day—there will be a tribute to Quincy Jones, who first performed in Sweden in 1953. He will be interviewed by Doug Ramsey. All of which brought back fond memories for jazz writer and ...

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Recording

Ira Gitler on Parker's Moods

Ira Gitler on Parker's Moods

Source: JazzWax by Marc Myers

Ira Gitler is a national jazz treasure. Each time we talk (which is often), the esteemed author, liner-notes writer, reviewer and historian sheds light on a jazz recording, artist or event with fresh detail and stories. Like Woody Allen's Leonard Zelig, Ira seems to have been at every major turning point in jazz history, an eyewitness to events most of us can only listen to or read about. Ira's books Swing to Bop and Masters of Bebop bear this out, ...

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Recording

Ira Gitler's First LP Liner Notes

Ira Gitler's First LP Liner Notes

Source: JazzWax by Marc Myers

At the dawn of the jazz LP era in the early 1950s, Ira Gitler worked for Prestige Records. As anyone who has owned a jazz LP knows, Ira has written the liner notes to hundreds of albums, including updates to his original notes in the CD and download eras. In short, Ira was among the first to hear many of the recordings we enjoy today and wrote about them for their album jackets. Here's a section from Ira's introduction to ...

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