Congrats to George Porter, Jr....
[On the Button]
...for his 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award from OffBeat magazine, celebrated by George and his band at the Best of the Beat Awards show last night, where quite a party broke out. Read Alex Rawls' great interview with the bassist wtih the funky mostest, which also appeared in the January print issue with George gracing the cover.
He got well-deserved kudos and gave a very gracious thank-you to his wife of 40+ years, who he brought out onstage and handed the award, saying he was giving it to her for all her support, then delivered an outstanding, feel-good performance with the Runnin' Pardners. Plus, dig who dropped by for the warm-up musical tribute put together by his daughter, Katrina: Art Neville, Cyril Neville, Dr. John, David Barard, Papa Mali, Stanton Moore, and George's horn section alumni. Not too shabby.
As the pulse of so much vital New Orleans music, how could George ever NOT matter?
[George and Terrence Houston, well into it (photo by Dan Phillips)]
[P.S. - George's segment wasn't the only music, by far, with two stages going pretty much all night. See the line-up at the BOTB link above.]
posted by Dan Phillips @ 11:26 PM
6 Comments:
What a great evening, that's why New Orleans is so special it possess the highest concentrations of musical talents. My CD library soon contains more New Orleans musicans than anything else ;o)
Sounds like a great time, sorry I missed it.
Although, to be truthful, I'm not all that sorry as both my daughter and I have the same ultra nasty cold. Ugh.
Mr. Porter deserves all the awards anyone wants to give him. Anyone sez different and I'll sneeze on 'em.
Ok, Mr. Porter sez he's got 2-3 thousand cassettes of recordings made over the last 45 years. So, does that mean we have to like torture him in to get him to get those tapes transfered to a more permanent medium?
Like vinyl?
If someone isn't jumping on this RIGHT NOW, I'm going to be very very disappointed in humanity as a whole.
Thank you for the post and the link to the article. Maybe this is the right place to draw people's awareness to www.savepbs.org where funds are being raised in order to help Mr Porter in litigation around the band, Porter Stoltz Battiste, threatening his material existence. I admit that I know nothing about the background, though.
Stephan
I too noted George's remarks in that interview about his hoard of what must surely be remarkable recordings. As much as I would want to hear more* of them, imagine the daunting task of not only going through and cataloging what's on each one, but transferring thousands of hours from one medium to another. I do enough of that myself to know it can consume your life! George needs to get a grant from somewhere and hire people to help him preserve that music. So glad the flood didn't get 'em.
*Note, Tuff City released the previously unissued album and limited release single by George's late 70s-early 80s band, Joy Ride, a number of years ago (I've done posts on both). But that was probably sourced from reel to reel, and vinyl. Still, it's a taste of what's in that stash....
Hope you and your daughter are feeling better, a-b.
Thanks for that reminder about savepbs.org. I do have a banner link to the site on the sidebar, too, as this is still an ongoing problem for the band.
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