Lewis Porter

Lewis Porter (born May 14, 1951 ) is an American jazz writer, jazz pianist and musicologist.

Life

Porter studied at the University of Rochester (Bachelor in Psychology 1972), Northeastern University (1976 Masters in Legal Advice, Counseling) and Tufts University (Masters degree in Music Theory 1979 with the thesis The Jazz Improvisation of Lester Young ). Porter received his PhD in musicology from Brandeis University in 1983 with a thesis on John Coltrane under Joshua Rifkin ( John Coltrane's Music of 1960 Through 1967: Jazz Improvisation as Composition. ). From 1977 he taught jazz history at Tufts University and at the same time from 1980 at Brandeis University. 1982 to 1986 he was an assistant professor at Tufts University, from 1986 assistant professor at Rutgers University, from 1990 associate professor and from 1999 professor at Rutgers University. He is currently the director of the course in jazz history (which he established in 1997, the only such master's course in the USA to date) and jazz research at Rutgers University. He is a regular talk host for Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York and an instructor at Lincoln Center. At the university he also holds courses on film history. He was visiting professor a. a. at the Manhattan School of Music and New York University.

He is best known for the biographies of Lester Young and John Coltrane, of whom he wrote the authoritative carefully researched biography (interviewing over 200 people for the biography).

He also appears as a jazz pianist (also on the synthesizer) and has released three CDs as a leader ("Second Voyage" 2002, among others with Dave Liebman , "Italian Encounter" 2007, among others with Furio Di Castri , Altrisuoni and "Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast" ( Terra Nova 2011) with David Rothenberg ). He also plays the saxophone. In 2012 his Concerto for Saxophone with Dave Liebman as a soloist at Harvard University premiered. In 2018 he presented the duo album Play Ornette with Chris Kelsey .

He works on a Coltrane discography and was nominated for a Grammy in 1996 for his re-release of Coltrane's recordings for Atlantic Records . In 1999 he received the “Jazz Research Award” from the “Association of Recorded Sound Collections” and the “Prix du livre de Jazz” from the “Academy of Jazz” in Paris for his Coltrane biography . Porter is the founder (2005) and editor (with John Howland) of Jazz Perspectives magazine .

Fonts

• Founder of the Encyclopedia of Jazz Musicians .
• Jazz, a Century of Change . Schirmer Books 1997 (anthology of essays on jazz history, also with his own essays).
• with Michael Ullman, Ed Hazell: Jazz - from its Origins to the Present . Prentice Hall, 1992.
• John Coltrane, his Life and Music . University of Michigan Press, 1998.
• John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme": Jazz Improvisation as Composition . Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 38, 1985, pp. 593-621.
• Lester Young . Twayne, Boston 1985, revised new edition University of Michigan Press 2005.
• Editor of The Lester Young Reader . Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington 1991.
• Yasuhiro Fujioka, with Lewis Porter, Yoh-Ichi Hamada: John Coltrane: A Discography and Musical Biography . Scarecrow Press. 1995 (Institute of Jazz Studies Monographs Series).
• Co-author of Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians . Gale Publications, New York 2000 (Porter wrote over 1000 biographies of jazz musicians).
• Publisher John Coltrane Reference Book . Routledge 2008.

Web links

• Official website
• Interview 2000, Allaboutjazz

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Report (2012) at All About Jazz
2. ↑ Encyclopedia of Jazz Musicians ( Memento of the original from September 2, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.