Archival Buffalo News feature articles

  His Wikipedia page doesn’t say anything about the Army, but otherwise Ronnie Foster totally lived up his promise.   June 27, 1970   ‘My Music, It’s Free’ Ronnie Foster, Jazz Organist, Likes Change   If it weren’t for the Army, 20-year-old jazz organist Ronnie Foster wouldn’t be around Buffalo at all. He was on the road – places like Indianapolis , Toledo , Akron , Cleveland – when the draft called him home in January for the first of three physicals. “If I get drafted,” he says, “I’m gonna try to get into some type of special service, you know? Something to do with music. If I can’t, I’ll probably go crazy.” He could have gone crazy already, hanging around, waiting for the Army. After more than two years on the road, running with Billy Weston’s band, meeting all kinds of musicians. “I have a theory,” he says, “that things that happen happen for a reason, you know? There’s a reason why I had to come home and stay home this long.” * * * SO HE c...

  In the spirit of Black Friday, we turn to the business side of the music business:   Aug. 22, 1970   Buffalo ’s Biggest Music Man – And How Records Are Promoted   If you look around the unfinished windowless room for a semblance of order, you’ll find it along the back wall. Floor-to-ceiling shelving, divided into little square boxes like post office boxes. Over each square are initials. WGGO, WENE, WUSJ, WBUZ. And since the night crew hasn’t been in to empty them, the little boxes are full of records. When Carroll Hardy isn’t on the road in Syracuse or Rochester or somewhere, he’s in here about 8 a.m., filling the center of the room with empty cartons and dealing records like “Hard Drivin’ Man’ by Dirty John’s Hot Dog Stand into all those little boxes. * * * CARROLL was on radio for 20 years, but now he looks more like the jazz musicians whose records he used to play. Longish hair, beard and mustache. Things his last station wouldn’t let him grow...

  Here’s treat for Thanksgiving – what might have been the first major article about this artist. Many more articles would be written about him in The News and elsewhere before his untimely passing back in May.   Aug. 15, 1970   Lucky Plays the Blues (And He’s Only 4)           By the time the Lucky Peterson Blues Band hits the stage at the Unity Festival in War Memorial Stadium, the pattern is already set.         Small crowd, big echo, big football field between the performers and the audience. Complete inertia. It’ll take somebody like James Brown to break it and he isn’t due till 9.         The band shows up about 3 – all wearing the gold shirts and black pants they made an expedition to buy Friday. Bass player Mark Freer, just recruited from Detroit , is fidgety. He’d be happier in jeans, he says. * * * AND THEN there’s Lucky. Lucky’s got thi...

            With my band affiliation gone (see July 18), I set about reformulating my love affair with the world of music. I began by going back to my folkie roots the very next weekend at the 1970 Mariposa Folk Festival on Toronto Islands . The headliners included James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, David Bromberg, Mississippi Fred McDowell and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. It was magical. Meanwhile, the duo featured in this weekend’s TV Topics turned out to be a perfect reflection of where my head was turning:   Saturday, July 25, 1970   Brasen Stays with ‘Light Music’   They’re Tired of Rock – But Don’t Call Them Folksingers           Gerry Ralston is on the phone and it’s hard to know whether to believe him or not.         Gerry’s a promoter, see? A self-styled, true-believing apostle of The Buffalo Scene.         During the past...

  When I woke up on this date, my 28th birthday, I was a working musician. Except here it was, Saturday, and we weren’t working. Me and my bandmates waited and waited to see if a last-minute gig would materialize. Occasionally it would. Mostly it didn’t. Around the time the sun started sinking, my then-wife Laura and I decided the two of us had waited long enough. We went to a movie. As fate would have it, a call came shortly thereafter for that last-minute gig. I missed it. Lavender Hill found a new bass player. My nights and weekends suddenly were free. I hung up my Hofner. Within three weeks, the calluses on my fingertips had disappeared. Meanwhile, in the pages of TV Topics, attention turned to another struggling band and a gig that got interrupted by an infamous event that happened a month earlier:   July 18, 1970   Gold Coast Like It Loud   Jack Solomon’s Court at Elmwood and Allen was packed from wall to brick wall June 14 when Gold Coast became ...

  Diane Taber never gave up music. She now lives in Ohio and, according to her website, she began writing her own jazzy tunes in 2006. When it was time to gather them together in an album, a 2014 release entitled “More Than One Ingredient,” she brought in some players from her hometown to back her up, including the son of Buffalo Music Hall of Fame jazz pianist Anne Fadale, who accompanied Diane to that audition for the Merv Griffin show that’s mentioned below. Judging from the song I just heard on YouTube, Diane is still in great voice.   July 11, 1970 Cheerleader to Club Singer Diane Taber Keeps on Move   Depending on how you look at it, being a singer at Gabriel’s Gate can be a long way from being a cheerleader at Lafayette High School .         Unless you measure with Diane Taber. Then it’s five years. And no matter what anyone who used to know her might think, she doesn’t believe she’s become all that different. ...