Bruce Lundvall, a past president of the jazz label Blue Note Records, in April at a Jazz Foundation of America event in New York. Credit Alan Gastelum
Bruce Lundvall Creates Sunrise Senior Living Jazz Festival
By NATE CHINENAUG. 22, 2014
He was a regular sight in the jazz clubs of Manhattan. Tall gentleman in glasses. Pinstriped suit. Neatly trimmed white beard. Often seated with business associates, but quiet, eyes trained on the stage. This was Bruce Lundvall, president of Blue Note Records, checking up on the talent or taking stock of the scene.
A number of things have recently changed for Mr. Lundvall, 78, but not his evident passion for the music, nor the pride he takes in being associated with it. Since receiving a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease within the last decade, he has ended his 25-year tenure at the helm of Blue Note, becoming a consultant and chairman emeritus.
And these days, it’s more of a production when he makes it out to a jazz club. Using a wheelchair, he attended a 75th-anniversary concert for the label at Town Hall in January — but didn’t travel to Washington four months later for a gala at the Kennedy Center.
“My wife and my neurologist urged me not to go,” he said by telephone this week, “because it wouldn’t be safe.” In June, after several falls at his home in northern New Jersey, he moved into an assisted-living center, Brighton Gardens of Saddle River.
Now, true to form, he has organized a musical summit there: the Sunrise Senior Living Jazz Festival, to be held in an outdoor tent this Sunday from 2 to 8 p.m. Its lineup will feature some of the artists Mr. Lundvall cultivated at Blue Note, notably the singers Dianne Reeves and Norah Jones, the pianists Chucho Valdés and Bill Charlap, and the saxophonists Joe Lovano and Ravi Coltrane.
Tickets are $79.67 ($158.34 for a V.I.P. package), with all proceeds benefiting the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research.
read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/23/arts/music/bruce-lundvall-creates-sunrise-senior-living-jazz-festival.html?_r=0
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