Chris Albertson

Chris Albertson 2006

Christiern Gunnar "Chris" Albertson (born October 18, 1931 in Reykjavík ; † April 24, 2019 in Manhattan , New York City ) was an American music journalist, jazz and blues writer and music producer of Icelandic origin.

Live and act

Albertson was educated in Iceland and England before moving to Copenhagen as a teenager. There he first heard Bessie Smith on the radio. Immediately impressed by their music, he began to delve deeper into Afro-American musical traditions and discovered that he was part of a movement of Danish youth enthusiastic about early American jazz and blues. Albertson spent much of his free time at Storyville, a Copenhagen jazz club owned by Karl Knudsen, who also owned a reissue label of the same name. At one of the club appearances of the British traditional jazz trumpeter Ken Colyer and his jazzmen , Albertson took on the band; the recording was released on the Storyville label as the first ever release of original recordings.

In 1955 he returned to Iceland, where he worked for two years as a disc jockey with Armed Forces Radio before moving to Philadelphia and working for WCAU and WHAT Radio. When he was with WCAU in August 1958, he interviewed Lester Young on the radio; One of the only four known interview recordings of the musician was recorded. In 1961 Albertson moved to New York, where Bill Grauer , owner of Riverside Records , hired him as a producer; there he oversaw the last sessions of Ida Cox and Meade Lux Lewis . He then directed the label's "Living Legends" series before joining Prestige Records . He was naturalized as an American citizen in 1963. He returned to broadcasting the following year, first to WNEW in New York and then to Pacifica Radio Outlet WBAI (where he served as station manager). He later also worked for the BBC . In 1968, John Hammond , then managing director of Columbia Records , finally approved the project with Albertson as producer after Albertson had a lengthy campaign to convince him to reissue Bessie Smith's work. When they were released, the five double albums were hailed as a reveal. It included classics like Downhearted Blues and Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out . The first edition in the series, Bessie Smith: The World's Greatest Blues Singer (1970) earned Albertson a Grammy Award for Best Liner Notes .

Research Albertson undertook as part of the reprint project, including a series of interviews with Smith's niece Ruby Walker, formed the cornerstone of his book Bessie , which he expanded for a reprint in 2003. The biography was adapted for television by the pay-TV provider HBO in 2014; Albertson found the resulting production disappointing, however. His book Bessie was immediately accepted as the definitive biography of Bessie Smith and a seminal example of historical research. In particular, Albertson's book dispelled the long-standing myth that Smith died in a car accident because a white-only hospital refused to accept her. The author interviewed doctor Hugh Smith, who treated the blues singer at the scene of the accident, and recalled that Smith's ambulance didn't even try to drive to a white hospital.

While working on the Bessie Smith Projects, Albertson hosted the PBS television series The Jazz Set . He later wrote two television documentaries, Alberta Hunter : My Castle's Rockin in 1988 and Masters of American Music: The History of Jazz in 1993 . Since the 1970s, Albertson has mainly worked as an author of liner notes (e.g. for the Mingus album Mingus Dynasty ), as an editor for Stereo Review , as an author for music magazines such as Down Beat and his own blog Stomp Off , the From 2009 to 2016 he filled with memories of his encounters with jazz musicians as well as with opinions on the current state of music, media and other topics.

Web links

• Chris Albertson at Discogs (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Michael J. West: Jazz and Blues Historian Chris Albertson Dies at 87th JazzTimes , May 13, 2019, accessed on May 17, 2019 (English). 
2. ↑ ^{a b c d} Richard Sandomir: Chris Albertson, Biographer of Bessie Smith, Is Dead at 87. The New York Times , May 9, 2019, accessed May 17, 2019 .