I read on the Interwebs today at work that jazz musician Wayman Tisdale had passed away after a two-year battle with bone cancer. The sadness I felt on learning of his passing had absolutely nothing to do with baskebtall - and everything to do with Wayman’s music. After basketball, he turned to bass guitar and eventually cut a number of jazz albums, and also toured in support of those albums. I blogged, back in November 2007, about a show he was to play at the Madame Walker Theatre downtown. I had to work the day he played the Walker back in 2007, but in the blog post, I said that I was going to get around to seeing him one of these days.
And sadly, that never happened. The Star’s report doesn’t say when he stopped touring - their report is almost all about Wayman Tisdale the basketball player. Those journalistic u-turns at the Star gave exactly one sentence to his music career. The report on ESPN’s website - you know, that sports network - gave three paragraphs to his music career. Not that it's news or anything that the Indianapolis Star sucks out loud.
I don’t know enough about jazz to know if his music was what hardcore jazz people consider good jazz or not, but I know enough about myself to know that I liked what I heard - and yes, that was just one report on NPR, but the news on NPR is so much better than the news you get anywhere else because they really get deep into the stories they report. The memory of that one report, and the music they played, made me look at the coming soon posters in the windows of the Walker every time I drove by the theatre. If he did play there again after the show I missed, then I missed his subsequent appearances, too. Should have done a better job of paying attention to that.
His CDs are available at Best Buy stores around town, and a few of them can be purchased on iTunes.
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