I purchased my first jazz record as a teenager and liked what I heard. The record was a sampler and featured music by Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Bix Beiderbecke, Dave Brubeck and half dozen others. I kept buying records, attending concerts when I could and learning as much as possible about jazz and blues.

In 1963 a government job took me to Washington D.C. where I fell in with other people, young and old, who liked the same kinds of music. In late 1963 (or early 1964), I took a photograph of Mississippi John Hurt at the Ontario Place Coffee House and later in 1964 took photographs of Skip James and Robert Wilkins with the same small 35mm Kodak camera. The pictures came out and I began taking more.

Luck was on my side; I wound up working for the legendary Squirrel Ashcraft, a man who’d played with Bix Beiderbecke in the 1920s and actually heard Louis Armstrong and King Oliver together. He was an elusive pianist who had a day job under the name of Edwin M. Ashcraft III, and was then the Central Intelligence Agency’s Director of Domestic Operations. He introduced me to all his musical friends. There were many of them.

He continued to make introductions when I moved to New York City in 1967. One introduction led to another, a favor offered to someone often brought a dozen in return. I became more involved in musical activities and bought a decent Pentax camera to document whatever might turn up.

I formed my first record company in 1969 with Marian McPartland and Sherman Fairchild, produced my first concerts at The New School in April 1972, and opened my first recording studio a few months later in September. I enjoyed what I was doing and continued doing it with modest success. It is now thirty-eight years and many hundreds of concerts, festivals and recordings later.

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