Announcing Ross Porter as Emcee for Poinsettia Supper Club
Photo of Ross Porter conducting an interview from mlb.com.
With the Los Angeles Dodgers playing in the National League Division Series finale tomorrow in Washington, we couldn’t resist sharing our own exciting Dodger's related news…
Today we formally announce that the amazing Ross Porter will emcee this year’s holiday fundraiser benefitting the New West Symphony!
Ross Porter is an American sportscaster, known for his 28-year tenure 1977-2004 as a play-by-play announcer for Los Angeles Dodgers baseball. Amongst his many accolades, Porter is the only broadcaster to have been the voice of a World Series champion (1981 and 1988 Dodgers) and a college basketball champion (with the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 1990). Porter was known for providing fans with statistical information on players during his broadcasts. He announced the last two out of the six Dodgers World Series titles. Ross was inducted into the Southern California Sports Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 2005 with Vin Scully, his colleague of 28 years, as his presenter.
On the eve of such an important night for Dodgers fans everywhere we want you to know that you'll have the opportunity to see legendary sportscaster Ross Porter in person on December 9 when the New West Symphony League presents the annual gala. We are thrilled to have Ross Porter on board for one of our most popular events of the year!
NWS reps pause to take a selfie with Ross Porter and his wife Lin at a Poinsettia Ball planning meeting on 10/12/16. L to R: Kiren Bansal, Director of Business Operations for New West Symphony, Lin and Ross Porter, Camille Sindell, Chair of the event, and Linda Hamilton, long-time Symphony supporter and friend of the Porters.
As the CEO of JAZZ.FM91 and one of Canada’s most respected broadcast producers, Ross Porter, ultimately, loves a great playlist. With his one-of-a-kind broadcasting voice, he has been introducing loyal listeners to some of the best names in Canadian jazz. Much like the jazz musicians that he loves, Porter is an innovator and expert improviser, adapting with the great changes that the Canadian music journalism industry has experienced over the past decades. As a greatly successful producer and a recipient of the Order of Canada, his hard work has certainly paid off.
By Bill King - We at FYIMUSICNEWS.CA have declared June and July Jazz months in Canada. Those short summer weeks are saturated with talent of remarkable abilities. The next three weeks I engage three prominent North American radio titans about trends, survival and what keeps them fighting for a music that has been marginalized most of its living days and yet keeps grooming some of the world’s finest and most creative musicians.
Newark New Jersey’s WBGO 88.3 FM - Michael Bourne, Toronto’s Ross Porter at Jazz.FM 91.1 and New York City’s Sirius/XM Real Jazz with Mark Ruffin.
Michael Bourne has been a presence on WBGO since the end of 1984. He's hosted the popular Singers Unlimited (Sunday 10 a.m.-2 p.m.) since 1985 and Afternoon Jazz (Monday-Friday 2 p.m.-6:30 p.m., including the 3 p.m. Blues Hour) since the mid-90's. He's been honored with the Willis Conover-Marian McPartland Award for Excellence in Jazz Broadcasting from the Jazz Journalists Association. Michael is also a senior contributor to Down Beat, with the magazine since 1969. Doctor Bourne earned a PhD in Theatre from Indiana University -- which comes in handy when he's a theatre critic for the WBGO Journal. (WBGO Website)
Bill King: How many days have you been at the Festival International de Jazz de Montreal and how many acts do you catch in a day?
Michael Bourne: Anywhere from usually two to five acts, rarely more than five, usually at least two.
Years ago at North Sea Jazz Festival I would go to 20 minutes of this and 20 minutes of that. It was neither exciting nor satisfying, so I got into the habit, even before I came here in 1992 of going to whole concerts. I do that pretty much here, except that I’m a Grand Prize judge so I have to see 30 minutes to judge a band and then see the last 45 minutes of a band at club L’Astral, go back to see another, then judge a band and then another 30 minutes and from there see the last half of something else. I did that a lot this trip. That was unusual, but there’s always one major thing every day. If there isn’t a major thing then there’s always the concert hall Gesu, cause I go to the 10:30 show and it’s almost always great.
BK: Yes, this year there’s Christian McBride, Joe Lovano.
Michael: Joe Lovano is actually playing Theatre Jean-Duceppe and I don’t like it because it doesn’t have rails and very steep stairs, but that’s my thing. I got in shape for this year. I actually physically trained to be able to come here this year and lost 25lbs. I walked a lot. I have crippled legs so I never had any problem except being tired after 11 days.
BK: There wasn’t much dissension on the choice of the Grand Prize?
Michael: There was none.
BK: How did that come about?
Michael: Never happened before.
BK: A group called the Pram Trio from Toronto.
Michael: Pram. I’ve been doing it since the 90’s and almost all of it as a judge along with Martin Roussel from the Festival Jazz International de Rimouski. An appearance at his festival is one of the prizes. He and I at one point, for years, were friendly antagonists and it usually came down to him and me in the final argument. Sometimes it’s what he wants and sometimes it is what I want but over the years we’ve kind of reached a symbiosis and we’ll sit there and listen when we hear a group and will look at each other and then there comes this moment where a finger goes up. That means we have one, that’s our symbol and it almost always the same group. Pram Trio was one of those groups. It was like this finger goes up and it was okay we have one. If we hear nobody else, this one wins.
There were a number of trios this year; piano trios and one guitar, bass and drums trio. We hear some guys playing and I’m snarky about some things so I lean over and say “Donald Byrd 1965, or Jackie McLean 1965.” I said this to a guy and he said yes, this is a tribute to Jackie McLean and we all laughed. That’s what he sounded like and sounded like that every time.
There are a lot of old Bluenote records’ style bands in this year’s festival. That’s fine, but we would rather not listen to old Blue Note Records.
I hear music here I’ve never heard before and hear jazz played in a way I’ve never heard. This festival really redefines what the word “jazz” means and even if it’s electronic and crazy or hip hop it’s here that I realize the continuum goes on. It’s not like the swing to the avant-garde to whatever else came along like fusion. Every generation has issues and reacts against whatever was new. I did too, that’s how I came here. It was like, “Oh, I get it. It still continues, doesn’t it?”
BK: It’s interesting too because I know the years you’ve been on radio.
Michael: 43
BK: Yes, 43 years. The numbers of recordings you receive each year - the vast majority have sameness to them.
Michael: Absolutely and even since the record business died which we keep being told about and there are no major record stores in New York at all, the last one just closed – music keeps arriving. We still get records in the age of MP3s, downloads and everything else. I think we’ve just got an album that was not available as a CD – so a CD was burned before you could play it on the radio. We still play CDs but we’re now moving into the digital age so everything is going to be on digital, but we will still be able to play CDs and sometimes play vinyl. Vinyl is coming back. So, the media changed but the music is the same because even though I say we redefine and we go forward with all these new groups, you can still hear pops, you can still hear New Orlean’s trad bands marching and playing very nicely.
I love this band called Street Mix. They’ve been playing most of the 35 years at this festival. They play everything from A to Z; Adderley to Led Zeppelin. They’ll play La Vie en Rose like pops did and then they’ll jump into Average White Band or “Black Cat or Dog” one of those Zepplin songs. They march together like New Orleans with caps and everything and then together they have this hard core moment when they do this Charles Ives thing moment with another band coming the other direction - two bands playing two different things which really works wonderfully. Then they meet in the middle and become a full-tilt New Orleans band.
BK: Fantastic
Michael: CBC once interviewed me and wanted the common cliché presumption that you can’t hear jazz at the jazz festival. That was their first question. “How do you answer people when they say you can’t hear jazz at the jazz festival?” I answered, “You listen. Do you notice there’s a band walking by playing ‘St. James Infirmary’?” Listen, it’s here. It’s all here.
BK: That’s true because I‘ve had people who have looked at the lineup and say off the top, “There’s no jazz here.”
Michael: Go to any jazz festival in the world.
BK: Maybe they should look past some of the key performers.
Michael: It’s all connected. When people come here to hear Diana Ross they also hear the other music and even if they don’t, it’s still here. George Wein put Chuck Berry on the Newport Jazz Festival in the ‘50s and people crapped…
BK: … And Mahalia Jackson
Michael: Even for years in New York, I started coming in ‘72 when he moved from Newport to New York - there were the O’Jays, the Temptations. Certainly there is plenty of blues in this Festival. It’s everything.
BK: I think what’s happened is that a great percentage of jazz icons are gone. Next in line it’s the Diana Ross’s' and Aretha’s'.
Michael: Even they - the icons are going too. We had many complaints this year about Aretha and B.B. that they really can’t do it anymore. Whereas, Tony Bennett, who is 87 years old, sang his ass off the other day with Lady Gaga. She is going to bring a bunch of people into this music because she loves this music and she is good at it.
BK: She was a standout on that duet record. She put her own good energy into it.
Michael: Well, she really likes it. It was on YouTube the next day from people’s phones. I only got to hear the sound check. When she sang, “Lush Life” at the sound check, she wasn’t loud or forceful and I told her. “That’s the way to sing this song.” She sang a couple of phrases, very original and I told her. She was excited. She’s very nice and it’s perfect because Tony Bennett is the nicest person in show business.
BK: It’s a good combination.
Michael: Tony really appreciates her and is crazy about her. The last person he was crazy about was KD Lang. Is she a jazz singer? I don’t know.
BK: She’s amazing.
Michael: She sings with a voice that’s so powerful and pure you’re touched in the organs and you don’t even know you are vibrating. I hear that here and I love that here. Certainly Oliver Jones played a magical concert last night. Dave Brubeck loved playing here, better than anywhere. Tony loves singing here better than anywhere.
BK: What for you is a standout? Which concerts stay in the back of your mind?
Michael: I loved the Tarantino show that opened the festival and played for about six nights. That is not a jazz show in the traditional sense. It’s theatre and I am also from the theatre. It was all these scenes of dialogue from Tarantino movies mixed in with all the songs from the soundtrack. It’s about eight or nine actors, singers and dancers and they’re all over the theatre and they’re playing all those famous moments. It’s all those iconic moments in Tarantino movies; “I’m going to go medieval on your ass.” What do they call a Big Mac, a “Royale with Cheese?” They intercut with jungle boogie and “Didn’t I Blow Your Mind This Time.” That was fascinating.
The thing is at this festival, I coined and no better to say it, “Very Montreal”. This group is very Montreal because they cross all the lines, they ignore all the lines as if they never existed” (which they don’t or shouldn’t).
There are theatrical groups and surreal groups like the Kurt Weill Cabaret, which was totally surreal and wonderful. The things that they show on the big stage were not usually like Diana Krall, who sang all those songs from the 20s and 30s, but Woodkid and the finale Deltron 30/30; a hip hop band, that brings out 100,000 people.
I never saw one moment of trouble. One hundred thousand people on the street, drinking, and dancing. Never once a fist fight. It’s amazing up here.
Twenty years they’ve been doing these big events, maybe more than that, and you bring out all the people you don’t know anything about yet. This is fine.
The commitment of this city: They shut down a major artery. Where we’re sitting used to be the Blumenthal building, an abandoned building. Now this one and the abandoned building next to it are being renovated.
BK: What is the building next to it?
Michael: The next one is going to be all dance; a dance facility with archives and everything like this building. There’s a museum in this building, there’s a jazz club, a restaurant year round. There's a Video Tek, which is phenomenal. You type in Miles Davis and see all Miles Davis videos every time he’s been here. They make that commitment to shut down a city like this. When I first came here this was just a street, but now there are fountains and children dancing.
They knocked down a huge hill and erected the Cartier de Spectacular. They moved the stage to the other end. When the first festival opened Stevie Wonder was at the end by the hotel.
BK: I think there were a million people.
Michael: It was something.
BK: You fought a hard battle at WBGO.
Michael: What battle?
BK: Maintaining the station at a time when the finances are an issue. Is it listener donation that keeps it going?
Michael: That’s a big deal. That’s why we still do three fund raising drives a year. We’re working on other ways to do it; other kinds of corporate sponsorship and other commitments. We have a really hard working staff and volunteers. A money generating board of directors like never before.
My best friend is now my boss; Amy Niles, and we’re getting close to actually being out of debt.
The fact that we’ve been on the air 35 years is a miracle. What we do is impossible. I get stopped on the street pretty much every day by somebody I don’t know who recognizes me. They are fans who listen to the station and some living here who are members of the station. We get emails from Brazil and Kuala Lampur. We have three members in Kuala Lampur. I don’t even know what time it is there so when they’re listening to me it’s twelve hours ahead or behind. I’m not sure. We’re expanding and travelling, we’re going back to travelling. We’re streaming things in different ways; the whole internet connection is extraordinary. People who never listened to the radio, but they listen to WBGO.org.
Ross Porter introduces the wonderful Louis Armstrong concert entitled: "Good Evening Ev'rybody: In Celebration of Louis Armstrong" . Are you a Louis Armstrong fan?
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