Anthony Davis wins a Pulitzer for Music

Anthony Davis has won the Pulitzer prize for Music, joining an illustrious list of jazz artists to have won the prize (incl. Henry Threadgill, Wadada Leo Smith, Ornette Coleman and Wynton Marsalis) for his opera “The Central Park Five,” a work that addresses race and judicial inequality drawing from the trial and conviction of one Latino teenager and four black teens later exonerated for the 1989 Central Park rape of a young white female banker, an event that prompted then property tycoon Donald Trump to take out newspaper ads advocating the return of the death penalty. Trump becomes a character in the opera.

An avant garde jazz pianist whose work includes appearances on albums with Anthony Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith and David Murray and whose track record in opera includes most notably X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X Davis told the San Diego Union-Tribune on winning the award: “I hope that, in a way, the opera brings to the forefront the idea that Trump’s ascent to power is a present danger and that, from the beginning, he has exploited racial tensions.''

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There are a lot of fan tributes online to alto saxophonist Richie Cole who has died aged 72. While there are no details so far his death has been confirmed on his official Facebook page where you can leave memories and photos of the player. From Trenton, New Jersey where his father was in the jazz club business, Cole was influenced by Sonny Rollins and Charlie Parker, studied at Berklee in Boston and began his professional career at the end of the 1960s when he joined the Buddy Rich Big Band. He later played with both the Lionel Hampton and the Doc Severinsen Big Bands and then formed his own quintet touring widely. His playing credits are substantial and included work with vocalese icon Eddie Jefferson, Manhattan Transfer, Freddie Hubbard and Sonny Stitt. Cole was best known for his four-year partnership with Jefferson and the pair toured widely in the US travelling from gig to gig in Cole’s minivan. But in 1979 Jefferson was shot dead outside Baker’s Keyboard Lounge in Detroit. “A day doesn’t go by that I don’t think about the man. He was the world’s greatest pure jazz singer,” Cole later recalled. Sadly two more of the players on the 1977 album New York Afternoon (Alto Madness) on which his signature piece 'Alto Madness' (complete with amusing howling alto-o-o-o-o-o-o-o introduction from Jefferson) appears, Vic Juris and Ray Mantilla, also passed away in recent months. SG

Anthony Davis wins a Pulitzer for Music

''Alto Madness'' saxist Richie Cole has died