Dick Sudhalter 1939-2008: man about music

[Fletch]

Jazz trumpeter-historian Dick Sudhalter has died age 68. He had suffered for several years from the mysterious Multiple System Atrophy, which robbed him of the power to play, walk, or even speak, altho he kept writing as long as he was able.

You might not know Dick unless you read about and listen to early jazz and the now aging New York-England crowd of hip eccentrics who have done so much to keep it alive. But he was a helluva writer, biographer of Bix Beiderbecke and Hoagy Carmichael, and author of Lost Chords (a huge book about the jazz of the 1920s & 30s that is obscure today because of its White origins). He was also a trumpet man with a lyrical soul and a gentle, satin-silver tone - imagine Chet Baker crossed with Bix - and a notoriously snappy dresser, just as much at home in seersucker and bucks among a hallful of grubby record collectors as on the boulevards of world capitals.

Anyway, he was a great guy, a man out of his time, and a Fedoran at heart. Here's to ya Sudbuster.

 

[LizzieMaine]

There's been a lot of buzz about Sudhalter on the 78-L list over the past day or so -- when "Lost Chords" came out about ten years ago, that list erupted in a violent controversy over the thesis of the book, and at least one member got banned, the only time that's happened in the 15-year history of 78-L. So it's a subject that generates a lot of passion, and unfortunately the controversy tends to obscure just how thorough and well-documented the book actually is. More people should read it, and *then* form opinions about it.

 

[Fletch]

Oh, I know how touchy jazz scholars can get when the R-word is brought up. The one common thread to it all is that those who do get touchy are almost always non-musicians. Which says volumes right there.

Having read Lost Chords, it strikes me that Dick didn't have much use for all that controversy. IIRC, a lot of juicy tidbits and pithy pronouncements were relegated to the endnotes, where I guess fewer pointyheads would be likely to find them.

(Then again, he might just have been trying to keep the narrative moving. You and I know pop history is mostly dead ends.)