By Charles Suhor
The last surviving founder of the New Orleans Jazz Club, Gilbert Erskine, died at age 81 in Malone, New York on December 5th last year, but his passing was unknown in New Orleans for almost nine months.
Erskine's sole continuing contact from his New Orleans years, writer Charles Suhor, grew concerned after several months passed without contact. He learned in late August through the internet and a series of phone calls that Erskine had died of heart disease and, surprisingly, no one in the small upstate New York city had an inkling of his formidable historic role and ongoing contributions to jazz.
James Coughlin, executor of his estate, told Suhor that Erskine was known in Malone as a somewhat reclusive retiree from the heady world of high finance. The lifelong bachelor was a ìvery private personî who spoke mainly about the investments that he scrupulously managed online. A blogger who knew Erskine from the Investor Village site for day traders googled his name after his death and learned that he was “quite the connoisseur of obscure jazz musicians. Who knew?"
But Erskine's dedication to jazz began early and was unflagging. A native of Louisville, Kentucky, he came to New Orleans in the late 1940s to attend Loyola University and be near the music he loved. On Mardi Gras day in 1948, Erskine, Johnny Wiggs, Donald Perry, and Al Diket stopped for lunch after the Zulu parade and decided to begin a club that would awaken Orleanians and the world to the music that had been overshadowed by big bands and vocalists of the swing era.
The New Orleans Jazz Club was a main force in the local revival of the late forties and early fifties. Erskine was active as a drummer at jam sessions with artists like Armand Hug and Johnny Wiggs at the club's monthly meetings and the fabled back room of the New Orleans Record Shop. In 1948 re made a recording with clarinetist Raymond Burke and pianist Stanley Mendelson. He wrote for the club's Second Line journal, continuing sporadically in that role for decades.
Erskine went to Chicago in the mid-fifties to begin a career in business and industry. He was an executive at American Industrial Leasing Company but maintained a vital interest in jazz as a writer for the Chicago-based Down Beat magazine. His crisp, insightful record reviews and deep jazz scholarship were internationally recognized. In 1960 editor Don DeMichael was seeking a New Orleans correspondent, and Erskine recommended Suhor. “I was thrilled," Suhor recalls. “The local dailies had little interest in jazz in those days, so my twice-monthly club listings and frequent reports and articles made Down Beat the magazine of record for jazz of all styles in New Orleans for a decade."
Erskine moved to New York City area to work as comptroller for a large financial institution, retiring in 1992 to Malone, located near the Canadian border. His public profile appeared mainly in his attendance at the Catholic Church. This was in stark contrast to the vigorous network that Erskine was maintaining via the internet and print publications. In his late years he contributed to sources like IAJRC Journal (International Association of Jazz Record Collectors), Bixology (Bix Beiderbecke webstie) and engaged friends in discussions of jazz books and youtube clips. He wrote the entry describing the New Orleans Jazz Club for the online Grove Music Dictionary.
A Renaissance man with wide-ranging intellectual interests and a passion for social justice, he wrote book reviews of Canterbury Tales for amazon.com and commented on Chaucer and Gerard Manley Hopkins in Religion and Ethics Newsweekly. He criticized clerical bureaucracies in the conservative Catholic magazine First Things. He wrote to the SEC and to a New York Times blog protesting “naked short selling" in the stock market.
Albert Haim, moderator of the Bix Beiderbecke site, belatedly hearing of Erskine's death, wrote, “He always came up with interesting, original and well thought-out postings, and he was a gentleman of the old era." Among the stalwarts of New Orleans jazz lore, Gilbert Erskine is an anomaly—a quiet legend.
Charles Suhor was introduced to Gilbert Erskine in 1948 by his late brother, jazz reedman Don Suhor, when Don and Gilbert were friends at Loyola University. He is author of Jazz in New Orleans: The Postwar Years through 1970 (Scarecrow Press/Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies, 1970)
The last surviving founder of the New Orleans Jazz Club, Gilbert Erskine, died at age 81 in Malone, New York on December 5th last year, but his passing was unknown in New Orleans for almost nine months.
Erskine's sole continuing contact from his New Orleans years, writer Charles Suhor, grew concerned after several months passed without contact. He learned in late August through the internet and a series of phone calls that Erskine had died of heart disease and, surprisingly, no one in the small upstate New York city had an inkling of his formidable historic role and ongoing contributions to jazz.
James Coughlin, executor of his estate, told Suhor that Erskine was known in Malone as a somewhat reclusive retiree from the heady world of high finance. The lifelong bachelor was a ìvery private personî who spoke mainly about the investments that he scrupulously managed online. A blogger who knew Erskine from the Investor Village site for day traders googled his name after his death and learned that he was “quite the connoisseur of obscure jazz musicians. Who knew?"
But Erskine's dedication to jazz began early and was unflagging. A native of Louisville, Kentucky, he came to New Orleans in the late 1940s to attend Loyola University and be near the music he loved. On Mardi Gras day in 1948, Erskine, Johnny Wiggs, Donald Perry, and Al Diket stopped for lunch after the Zulu parade and decided to begin a club that would awaken Orleanians and the world to the music that had been overshadowed by big bands and vocalists of the swing era.
The New Orleans Jazz Club was a main force in the local revival of the late forties and early fifties. Erskine was active as a drummer at jam sessions with artists like Armand Hug and Johnny Wiggs at the club's monthly meetings and the fabled back room of the New Orleans Record Shop. In 1948 re made a recording with clarinetist Raymond Burke and pianist Stanley Mendelson. He wrote for the club's Second Line journal, continuing sporadically in that role for decades.
Erskine went to Chicago in the mid-fifties to begin a career in business and industry. He was an executive at American Industrial Leasing Company but maintained a vital interest in jazz as a writer for the Chicago-based Down Beat magazine. His crisp, insightful record reviews and deep jazz scholarship were internationally recognized. In 1960 editor Don DeMichael was seeking a New Orleans correspondent, and Erskine recommended Suhor. “I was thrilled," Suhor recalls. “The local dailies had little interest in jazz in those days, so my twice-monthly club listings and frequent reports and articles made Down Beat the magazine of record for jazz of all styles in New Orleans for a decade."
Erskine moved to New York City area to work as comptroller for a large financial institution, retiring in 1992 to Malone, located near the Canadian border. His public profile appeared mainly in his attendance at the Catholic Church. This was in stark contrast to the vigorous network that Erskine was maintaining via the internet and print publications. In his late years he contributed to sources like IAJRC Journal (International Association of Jazz Record Collectors), Bixology (Bix Beiderbecke webstie) and engaged friends in discussions of jazz books and youtube clips. He wrote the entry describing the New Orleans Jazz Club for the online Grove Music Dictionary.
A Renaissance man with wide-ranging intellectual interests and a passion for social justice, he wrote book reviews of Canterbury Tales for amazon.com and commented on Chaucer and Gerard Manley Hopkins in Religion and Ethics Newsweekly. He criticized clerical bureaucracies in the conservative Catholic magazine First Things. He wrote to the SEC and to a New York Times blog protesting “naked short selling" in the stock market.
Albert Haim, moderator of the Bix Beiderbecke site, belatedly hearing of Erskine's death, wrote, “He always came up with interesting, original and well thought-out postings, and he was a gentleman of the old era." Among the stalwarts of New Orleans jazz lore, Gilbert Erskine is an anomaly—a quiet legend.
Charles Suhor was introduced to Gilbert Erskine in 1948 by his late brother, jazz reedman Don Suhor, when Don and Gilbert were friends at Loyola University. He is author of Jazz in New Orleans: The Postwar Years through 1970 (Scarecrow Press/Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies, 1970)
