Arizona Jazz Advocate Patricia Myers has Died.
Lew Shaw
PATRICIA MYERS, of natural causes on Feb. 2 in Scottsdale, AZ. A long-time jazz advocate, writer, photojournalist, producer of events, educator, co-founder and past president of Jazz in AZ, past president of Arizona Press Women, and a former Festival Editor for The American Rag. A graduate of the University of Akron with a graduate fellowship from Northwestern University, she was a contributor to TIME-Life Books and several jazz encyclopedias.
She spent the past 24 summers in Paris, enjoying the Parisian sights during the day and surveying the jazz scene at night. Known as a strong proponent for the interests of musicians, she was recognized as the quintessential voice for the jazz community in Phoenix.
Lew Shaw started writing about music as the publicist for the famous Berkshire Music Barn in the 1960s. He joined the West Coast Rag in 1989 and has been a guiding light to this paper through the two name changes since then as we grew to become The Syncopated Times. 47 of his profiles of today's top musicians are collected in Jazz Beat: Notes on Classic Jazz. Volume two, Jazz Beat Encore: More Notes on Classic Jazz contains 43 more! Lew taps his extensive network of connections and friends throughout the traditional jazz world to bring us his Jazz Jottings column every month.