[Dixielandjazz] New Orleans Jazz Club Founder dies at 81--Gilbert Erskine

[Norman Vickers]

To: DJML  & Musicians and Jazzfans list

From:  Norman Vickers, Jazz Society of Pensacola

 

Dear Listmates:  he is Charlie Suhor’s  obituary/tribute for Gilbert
Erskine.  Charlie indicates that he was the last surviving founder of New
Orleans Jazz Club. Be sure to see the photos from the Louisiana State
Museum—Johnny Wiggs, Armand Hug and others.

 

For those interested,  I’ve appended a URL for the New Orleans Jazz Club
Story, from the “Second Line” publication of New Orleans Jazz Club dated
1955.

http://www.nojazzclub.org/SecondLine/V06.Special.1955/jazz_club_story.htm

 

Thanks, Charlie.  

 

>From Charlie Suhor:

From: Charles Suhor [mailto:csuhor at zebra.net] 
Sent: Monday, August 30, 2010 2:06 PM
To: Norman Vickers
Subject: New Orleans Jazz Club Founder dies at 81

 

Hello, Norm--Here's the obituary/tribute for Gil. Would you pass it on to
your list and to DJML? Thanks.--Charlie

GILBERT ERSKINE, NEW ORLEANS JAZZ CLUB FOUNDER, DIES AT 81

The last surviving founder of the New Orleans Jazz Club, Gilbert Erskine,
died at age 81 in Malone, New York on December 5th last year, but his
passing was unknown in New Orleans for almost nine months. 

Erskine’s sole continuing contact from his New Orleans years, writer Charles
Suhor, grew concerned after several months passed without contact. He
learned in late August through the internet and a series of phone calls that
Erskine had died of heart disease and, surprisingly, no one in the small
upstate New York city had an inkling of his formidable historic role and
ongoing contributions to jazz. 

James Coughlin, executor of his estate, told Suhor that Erskine was known in
Malone as a somewhat reclusive retiree from the heady world of high finance.
The lifelong bachelor was a ìvery private personî who spoke mainly about the
investments that he scrupulously managed online. A blogger who knew Erskine
from the Investor Village site for day traders googled his name after his
death and learned that he was "quite the connoisseur of obscure jazz
musicians. Who knew?" 

But Erskine’s dedication to jazz began early and was unflagging. A native of
Louisville, Kentucky, he came to New Orleans in the late 1940s to attend
Loyola University and be near the music he loved. On Mardi Gras day in 1948,
Erskine, Johnny Wiggs, Donald Perry, and Al Diket stopped for lunch after
the Zulu parade and decided to begin a club that would awaken Orleanians and
the world to the music that had been overshadowed by big bands and vocalists
of the swing era. 

The New Orleans Jazz Club was a main force in the local revival of the late
forties and early fifties. Erskine was active as a drummer at jam sessions
with artists like Armand Hug and Johnny Wiggs at the club’s monthly meetings
and the fabled back room of the New Orleans Record Shop. In 1948 re made a
recording with clarinetist Raymond Burke and pianist Stanley Mendelson. He
wrote for the club’s Second Line journal, continuing sporadically in that
role for decades. 

Erskine went to Chicago in the mid-fifties to begin a career in business and
industry. He was an executive at American Industrial Leasing Company but
maintained a vital interest in jazz as a writer for the Chicago-based Down
Beat magazine. His crisp, insightful record reviews and deep jazz
scholarship were internationally recognized. In 1960 editor Don DeMichael
was seeking a New Orleans correspondent, and Erskine recommended Suhor. "I
was thrilled," Suhor recalls. "The local dailies had little interest in jazz
in those days, so my twice-monthly club listings and frequent reports and
articles made Down Beat the magazine of record for jazz of all styles in New
Orleans for a decade."

Erskine moved to New York City area to work as comptroller for a large
financial institution, retiring in 1992 to Malone, located near the Canadian
border. His public profile appeared mainly in his attendance at the Catholic
Church. This was in stark contrast to the vigorous network that Erskine was
maintaining via the internet and print publications. In his late years he
contributed to sources like IAJRC Journal (International Association of Jazz
Record Collectors), Bixology (Bix Beiderbecke webstie) and engaged friends
in discussions of jazz books and youtube clips. He wrote the entry
describing the New Orleans Jazz Club for the online Grove Music Dictionary. 

A Renaissance man with wide-ranging intellectual interests and a passion for
social justice, he wrote book reviews of Canterbury Tales for amazon.com and
commented on Chaucer and Gerard Manley Hopkins in Religion and Ethics
Newsweekly. He criticized clerical bureaucracies in the conservative
Catholic magazine First Things. He wrote to the SEC and to a New York Times
blog protesting "naked short selling" in the stock market.

Albert Haim, moderator of the Bix Beiderbecke site, belatedly hearing of
Erskine’s death, wrote, "He always came up with interesting, original and
well thought-out postings, and he was a gentleman of the old era." Among the
stalwarts of New Orleans jazz lore, Gilbert Erskine is an anomaly—a quiet
legend.

____________________________________

Charles Suhor was introduced to Gilbert Erskine in 1948 by his late brother,
jazz reedman Don Suhor, when Don and Gilbert were friends at Loyola
University. He is author of Jazz in New Orleans: The Postwar Years through
1970 (Scarecrow Press/Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies, 1970)
_____________________________________

Photos courtesy of Louisiana State Museum Jazz Collection.
[Note: The unidentified guitarist in the first picture is Angelo (Angie)
Palmisano. I worked with him and Tom Brown in 1951 at the Jefferson Buzzards
Hall on Annunciation Street.--CS]

http://louisdl.louislibraries.org/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/JAZ&CISOPTR
=2715&CISOBOX=1&REC=2


http://louisdl.louislibraries.org/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/JAZ&CISOPTR
=2716&CISOBOX=1&REC=4