Bill Crow, bassist, author and occasional Rifftides correspondent, has taken to the air or the ether, or whatever you call the medium that contains the internet. His new website is a work in progress, as all good websites should be. He writes,
I keep polishing it as I learn the software. Some of the pictures are a little fuzzy, but I think I know how to fix that, as soon as I get time to rescan them.
Well and good, but the photos are fascinating as is. Bill uses many of them to illustrate his biography, from his birth in 1927 to the present. They include shots, from early in his career, of two musicians who would have been among the best known and most admired in jazz if—to grab the nearest handy cliché—their lifestyle choices had been a tad more moderate and they had lived. They were the drummer Buzzy Bridgeford and the tenor saxophonist Freddy Greenwell. Among his slightly better known colleagues are Stan Getz, Gerry Mulligan, Marian McPartland, Kai Winding and J.J. Johnson, Claude Thornhill, Tommy Flanagan and Bob Brookmeyer, to name a few among dozens. Crow’s discography starts with Mary Lou Williams in 1950. Its most recent entry is a CD with tenor saxophonist Tony Lavorgna, recorded last month.
I am adding billcrowbass.com to the links in the right-hand column, where it shall remain.