Turk Van Lake

Turk Van Lake (born June 15, 1918 in Boston as Vanig Rupen Hovsepian , † September 1, 2002 in Staten Island ) was an American jazz guitarist , composer , arranger , author and music teacher .

Live and act

Hovsepian, child of Armenian immigrants from the area of Lake Van (Engl. Lake Van ) were, grew up in New York and graduated from Tottenville High School. He studied harmony and twelve-tone music with Otto Cesana at the Boston Conservatory of Music . In 1937 he sold his first arrangement to Chick Webb . In 1949 he recorded a string quartet. In 1952, his works were performed in a concert that also included compositions by John Cage , Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison .

He began his interpreting career under the stage name Turk Van Lake in Boston in the early 1940s, when he played rhythm guitar with Charlie Spivak (1941), Georgie Auld and Sam Donahue (1942), Charlie Barnet (1943) and again with Auld in 1944. From 1945 to 1948 he worked as an arranger for Count Basie , Benny Goodman , Lionel Hampton and Buddy Rich . From 1947 to 1950 he went back to the Boston Conservatory of Music and worked as a music teacher until 1954. In mid-1954 he had his own quartet and then played in the Les Elgart orchestra until 1958 . In 1958/59 he went on tour with Benny Goodman. Van Lake also worked on recordings with Terry Gibbs , Big Miller , Nat Pierce (1957-61) and Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson (1957). He also worked with Sarah Vaughan ( In the Land of Hi-Fi , 1955) and Herbie Mann (1965) and in 1962 went on a tour of the Soviet Union with the Benny Goodman Orchestra , during which he also visited the homeland of his ancestors.

In the 1950s, Van Lake wrote a number of articles for the music magazine Metronome , later including some of the liner notes for the new edition (1999) of Goodman's The Famous Carnegie Hall Concert in 1938 . In later years he taught political science at the College of Staten Island , where he died in a nursing home in 2002.

Web links

• Obituary in the jazz newspaper
• Turk van Lake at Allmusic (English)
• Obituary in The New York Times
• Article by Turk van Lake at freddiegreen.org

Lexical entries

• Carlo Bohländer , Karl Heinz Holler, Christian Pfarr: Reclam's Jazz Guide . 3rd, revised and expanded edition. Reclam, Stuttgart 1989, ISBN 3-15-010355-X .
• Richard Cook , Brian Morton : The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD . 6th edition. Penguin, London 2002, ISBN 0-14-051521-6 .
• John Jörgensen, Erik Wiedemann Jazz Lexicon . Mosaic, Munich, 1967

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b} Steve Jordan, Tom Scanman: Rhythm Men. Fifty Years in Jazz , p. 138
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Obituary The Times , November 7, 2002
3. ↑ See Billboard September 17, 1949, p. 20
4. ↑ Cage Chronology ( Memento from June 12, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
5. ↑ As an arranger, as well as a composer, he wrote under his own name.
6. ↑ cf. Bielefeld Catalog 1988
7. ^ John McDonough: Benny Goodman at Carnegie Hall - The Story of the Session ( Memento from January 21, 2016 in the Internet Archive )