"...I'm impressed by its integration of music and history and sociology. I like the layout and design...the photos, label reproductions (and) being able to listen to the CDs immediately (what a godsend this is). And I like being able to open it anywhere and find stuff that's engaging."
- James Dapogny, jazz musician, university professor, and Jelly Roll Morton expert
"Impressive and enjoyable...You've broken new ground in a number of areas: the layout,
the photos, the blown-up records, the important inclusion of CDs...Thanks for this
useful and entertaining addition to the jazz oeuvre."
-Duncan Schiedt, veteran jazz photographer and author of Jazz in Black and White
"The commentary is lively, trenchant and deeply interesting to one who is fond of
this era in music but has only a slight knowledge of it...I'd never heard (or even heard of)
James P. Johnson's "Snowy Morning Blues," but it's gorgeous."
-Richard Snow, former editor-in-chief, American Heritage magazine
"A Golden age of Jazz Revisited" is a truly handsome production. The text is knowledgeable and loving and puts you right back in time with the great ones in jazz. It is really a sort of musical time capsule. Having the CDs to go along was a terrific idea.
- Al Slote, author and television script writer
"Schumacher writes in a clear, light-hearted style but hardly wastes a word and the result is that the book contains a tremendous amount of information...The two CDs contain some of the greatest music ever put on wax."
- Piotr Michalowski, university professor and jazz musician
Southeastern Michigan Jazz Association Update
Author and host Hazen Schumacher and crew in the 1970s during a call-in show at his long-running "Jazz Revisited" program on WUOM, Ann Arbor, MI. He started the program in 1967 and it was picked up by National Public Radio in 1971, eventually playing on more than 200 affiliates around the country. The show presented jazz music from 1917 to 1947, from an amazing collection of jazz records, in a half-hour format, with commentary by Schumacher.
In 1983, NPR went through a budget crisis and was unable to continue distribution of the program, so Michigan Radio offered the program by satellite. When WUOM changed format, Schumacher stopped producing "Jazz Revisited" in 1997.
Hamburg Jazz Museum
The Hamburg (Germany) Jazz Museum was founded by a retired German industrialist as a repository of early jazz recordings and printed material. A factory was converted to a display and workplace for the Museum's records, sheet music, books, and other memorabilia.
The museum's owner, Wilke-Jan Eiben, is dedicating his retirement to the preservation of early jazz in all of its manifestations. He has flags on his roof, two of which proclaim, in German, "Fletcher Henderson Lives" - "Duke Ellington Lives." He appropriated the nickname of one of his idols, Bix Beiderbecke. To that end, his website is www.bixeibenhamburg.com. The website displays pictures of his activities as well as the sounds of the "Jazz Revisited" radio programs. Eiben has made them available to radio stations, such as one called "Swinging Hamburg."
When Hazen Schumacher finished producing "Jazz Revisited" after thirty years of programming, he looked for a home for the extremely valuable record collection which had been used to produce the programs. Some U.S. sources were eager to "cherry-pick" (choose just a few) from the collection but none were willing to accommodate it in its entirety (approximately 50,000 78rpm records, 10,000 LPs, 500 CDs of early jazz as well as dozens of reference books). Schumacher noticed the Hamburg Museum's ad in a collectors' magazine. They were looking for large collections. Contact was made and the collection was carefully packed and shipped to Germany. Included were the master tapes of the 1,560 "Jazz Revisited" half-hour programs. The Museum transferred all of these shows to CDs and is now merchandizing them.
Schumacher and his wife Rusty have visited the Museum three times and are happy to report that the curators are taking good care of his jazz offspring!
You can experience "Jazz Revisited" at the website of the museum: www.bixeibenhamburg.com. Click on "skip intoduction" and a page with 24 logos will come up; click any of them, and a different "Jazz Revisited" show will play. Shows are changed every couple of weeks.
