I still haven’t gotten over the annual Louis Armstrong Foundation dinner earlier this week.
The foundation’s purpose is music and medicine as cross-causes to help people.
The night unfolded at the soaring Angel Orensanz Center on Norfolk Street in the Lower East Side. The Gothic structure, built in 1849, was a synagogue for most of its life.
I first went there in 2004 when Alicia Keys put on a private show for her charity, with Clive Davis in attendance. All I remember was Alicia singing a bunch of Marvin Gaye songs. She was insanely good.
Fast forward to this week, with music rising through the rafters. My great friend Tracey Jordan (the most popular person in the music biz) was honored with an award named for her mother, the late legendary jazz singer Sheila Jordan. Suzanne Vega was also honored with the Phoebe Jacobs Award, and performed. (See below for video and Tracey’s post.)
It was one of those nights when you remember what live music is, and was, and can be. Hearing Suzanne Vega perform “Tom’s Diner” in an intimate setting with Marhall Crenshaw and a group of A list Woodstock musicians was a highlight. (See below.)
David Amram, a modern music mission impossible, just returned from a Jack Kerouac weekend in Lowell, Massachusetts. (Yes, they were friends and worked together.) He’s in demand everywhere and hasn’t lost a step. He wrote the soundtrack scores for classic movies like “The Manchurian Candidate” and “Splendor in the Grass.”
And he’s still going!
PS So appropriate that the Louis Armstrong Foundation is in a former Jewish temple. Louie was raised by the Karnofskys, a family of Lithuanian-Jewish immigrants New Orleans. He wrote all about them in his first memoir.
