Word: butler
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...they are passing through career doors that were opened by the success of Wynton Marsalis. "Young men can now make a living playing straight-ahead jazz, and Wynton is responsible for that being possible," says Dan Morgenstern, director of the Institute of Jazz Studies of Rutgers University. Says George Butler, the executive producer at Columbia Records who signed both Marsalis and Connick: "Wynton has played a major role in the popularity of this music today. This is probably the most propitious time for this music since the '50s and early...
...Butler has been on the cutting edge of the new jazz age. But with Marsalis' success, other major labels have joined what amounts to a feeding frenzy on young talent. Although they had virtually abandoned straight-ahead jazz by the early '80s, most major record companies have now established active jazz divisions. Many of them have also begun digging into their vaults and reissuing hundreds of classic jazz recordings...
...Columbia's George Butler first heard Marsalis with the Blakey band while scouting New York City jazz clubs for young talent. "Here was an 18-year-old playing with the maturity and facility of men twice his age," he says. "He was the ideal person to appeal to a young marketplace and revive the larger audiences that had been into acoustic jazz in the '50s." Butler promptly signed the new artist and devised an unheard-of marketing strategy: simultaneous record releases in both the jazz and classical idioms. Marsalis' first Columbia jazz album won a 1983 Grammy nomination. The following...
...Butler also claims some credit for the clean-cut image that set the trumpeter apart from scruffy rockers and fusionists. Back in his Jazz Messengers days, Marsalis would go onstage in tennis shoes and overalls. "But once we started to talk about appearance," says Butler, "Wynton began to epitomize what jazz musicians ought to look like." Indeed, sartorial elegance has become de rigueur among the new generation of jazzmen...
Heaney's poetry, though, has never really left Ireland, despite the fact that its author has been Boylston professor of rhetoric here for the past six years. Unlike William Butler Yeats, whose far-roving mind soon strayed from the lake isle of Innisfree, Heaney is a stationary poet, taking few side-trips to Cambridge or California, let alone Byzantium. His verses are circumscribed by the ancient parameters of the Celtic-Norse world, borders that almost everyone else has forgotten...