Miscellaneous

Although an only child, I come from a musical family. My father played the violin and one of his sisters was a piano teacher. My maternal uncle is the late composer David Diamond who often lived with us in Rochester, NY, in the 1940s and 1950s. The clarinetist Z. Mitchell Weiss is my first cousin… Read more

I recently saw the movie, “Green Book,” which is based on the life of pianist Donald Shirley (1927-2013). In 1998, I interviewed Shirley as part of the research carried out by Michael Fitzgerald and myself, culminating in the biography, “Rat Race Blues: The Musical Life of Gigi Gryce.” Gryce and Shirley grew up together in… Read more