Hsio Wen Shih

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Hsio Wen Shih was a Sino-American architect and jazz critic.

Life

He was the son of a Chinese diplomat, studied architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and developed a weakness for jazz. He worked as a critic, for example for Down Beat and for Liner Notes in the 1950s and early 1960s, but also for a short time as a partner of Iggy and Joe Termini in the management of the Five Spot Jazz Club. He was one of the founders of The Jazz Review alongside Martin Williams and Nat Hentoff . He was their art director and reviewed records in them.

He also designed the stage for the 1954 Newport Jazz Festival . In the Jazz Review he is presented as an architect and expert in acoustics, a student of the music of many cultures .

From 1961 he was married to the New York heiress and jazz harpist Daphne Hellman (1916–2002). She was a well-known society lady in New York, was married several times, including to publisher Harry Bull and author Geoffrey Hellman, worked at times as an actress and model, and was born Van Beuren Bayne, granddaughter of the founder of Seaboard National Bank. She later played regularly for 30 years in the Village Vanguard and after its closure as an old lady to pass the time as a street musician in New York, Paris, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka and other places.

Shih left her in 1965 and disappeared without saying goodbye. Nothing is known about his whereabouts after 1966. There were rumors of a suicide, after others he went back to China.

Fonts

  • The Spread of Jazz and the Big Bands , in Hentoff, McCarthy Jazz 1959, Reprint Da Capo 1975, pp. 173-187

literature

Biographical references in John Gennari Blowin hot and cool. Jazz and its critics , University of Chicago Press, 2006, p. 413, footnote 30

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ He published at MIT A student center for the MIT , 1953
  2. ↑ For example, he wrote the liner notes for Sabu Martinez Palo Congo , Blue Note Records 1957
  3. ^ John Williams A night at the Five Spot , Down Beat, February 13, 1964, reprinted in Williams Jazz Changes
  4. ^ Burt Goldblatt : Newport Jazz Festival- The illustrated story , 1977
  5. ↑ 1958, No. 2, p. 50.
  6. ↑ Michael T. Kaufman Jazz Harpist Hears a Different Drummer , New York Times January 11, 1995 .
  7. ^ Obituary in the New York Times, August 8, 2002
personal data
SURNAME Shih, Hsio Wen
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Chinese jazz critic and architect
DATE OF BIRTH 20th century