[Dixielandjazz] Mike Zwerin Obit

[Stephen G Barbone]

Some of the readers, especially in the NYC area,  may have known Mike.

Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband


April 6, 2010 - NY TIMES - By Mark McDonald
OBITUARY
Mike Zwerin, Jazz Critic and Author, Is Dead at 79

By MARK McDONALD
Mike Zwerin, a jazz trombonist who became a prominent jazz critic and  
author, died Friday in Paris after a long illness. He was 79.

When he was 18, nervously sitting in with Art Blakey’s group at  
Minton’s Playhouse, in Harlem, Mr. Zwerin was noticed by the trumpeter  
Miles Davis, who complimented the young player and used him briefly in  
his nonet at the Royal Roost, a New York club.

Mr. Zwerin later played with the big bands of Maynard Ferguson and  
Claude Thornhill. But it was as a critic and author that he made his  
mark on jazz.

Mr. Zwerin was the jazz columnist for The Village Voice in New York  
from 1964 until 1969, then moved to Europe and served as the paper’s  
European editor until 1971. He also wrote for Rolling Stone and other  
magazines.

He became a music critic in 1979 for The International Herald Tribune  
in Paris. In 2005 he became a music critic for Bloomberg News.

Mr. Zwerin also wrote several books about his own life in the world of  
jazz, most notably “Close Enough for Jazz” and “The Parisian Jazz  
Chronicles: An Improvisational Memoir.”

In his 1969 book, “The Silent Sound of Needles,” Mr. Zwerin wrote  
about his struggles with drug addiction. Using drugs was “part of the  
ethic of what I thought was being hip, which was really stupid,” he  
said in a 2005 interview with Bloomberg News. “When you’re that age,  
you’re immortal.”

Michael Zwerin was born in New York on May 18, 1930. He grew up in  
Forest Hills, Queens; went to the High School of Music and Art; and  
graduated from the University of Miami. He worked for his father at  
the Capitol Steel Corp. and became its president when his father died,  
though he continued to perform. But music was his passion and his  
calling, especially jazz, and in 1964 he began writing about it.

Mr. Zwerin also wrote about the loneliness that can come with being an  
expatriate, and in “The Parisian Jazz Chronicles,” writing about  
himself in the third person, he told his wife, Martine, that she  
“should sprinkle his ashes over the Atlantic.”

“He was an alienated American, a wandering Jew, a musician playing to  
empty houses on an endless foreign tour,” he wrote. “He was on  
permanent loan to Paris, like a painting in a museum.”