Over the past 18 years, the Syracuse Area Music Awards (Sammys) have built a reputation for bringing the best of the region’s talent, both emerging and legendary, together for a night of celebration and recognition.
An impressive variety of genres will be inducted into the Sammys Hall of Fame this year, ranging from the heavy, hard rock of David “Rock” Feinstein and The Rods to the classical genius of the now-defunct Syracuse Symphony Orchestra. Add to that the fact that this year’s attendees will be able to see the Sammy Awards hit new high, or loud, notes as not just one, but two headliners take the stage on Friday, Nov. 11, 7 p.m., at the OnCenter Ballroom, 800 S. State St.: the reunion of the 1980-to-1986 members of RCA-signed progressive rock group 805, followed by hard rockers Feinstein and The Rods.
The 2011 Hall of Famers will be recognized at the Veterans’ Day bash, as well as during the induction ceremony on Thursday, Nov. 10, 7 p.m., at Upstairs at the Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, 246 Willow St. Hall of Famers include: veteran musicmakers Feinstein, 805 and Marcia Hagan, longtime radio and TV personality Rick Gary, music educator Joe Riposo and the Syracuse New Times Lifetime Achievement award winner, the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra.
The Sammys celebration starts with a cocktail reception at 5:45 p.m. in the OnCenter Ballroom lobby, with the ceremonies to commence at 7 p.m. The event will include awards recognizing the best recordings in 11 musical styles as well as the Brian Bourke Award for Best New Artist, People’s Choice for Best Club to Hear Live Music and People’s Choice Best Band. In addition to the two HoF inductee groups performing, local golden-piped stalwart Isreal Hagan will also take the stage.
JOE RIPOSO
Joe Riposo has had an accomplished career. He received the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra Musicians Award for Outstanding Music Educator in 2009, was recipient of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) Award for 15 years in a row, inducted to the Fine Arts Hall of Fame in 2003 and the Sammys Hall of Fame in 1997, as a performer, among a slew of others.
He served as director of music education for the Liverpool Central School District for 31 years, as the Northeastern Division coordinator for the International Association of Jazz Educators for six years, was director for the Cultural Resource Council’s youth jazz programs in the early 1990s and composed and per formed in bands for Diane Schuur, Harry Connick Jr. and Natalie Cole. Today, he is director of jazz studies at Syracuse University as well as a composer, performer and author. And he’s still as gracious as ever.
“I’ve gotten many awards over the years, my walls are covered, but the award that I really value the most is right here in Syracuse because at least I know that I’m being presented that award because of my peers,” he says. “That means an awful lot to me. I’m humbled as I always am. I guess it’s an outgrowth of what I do, but not really my main objective. My main objective is to teach and play and that’s what I love and I get a lot of gratification out of that.”
Although Riposo, 78, grew up in a musical family, he was inspired to take up clarinet during his wonder years when he saw the 1945 Warner Brothers musical biography Rhapsody in Blue, with Robert Alda as George Gershwin, that opened with a silhouette playing “Rhapsody in Blue,” with that iconic clarinet intro. He immediately ran home from the bijou and told his father that was the instrument. From there he moved to saxophone and all the other woodwinds.
Riposo studied music at SU, graduated in 1957 and spent a short time touring before returning to the Salt City in 1960. Although he’s had offers to teach all over the world throughout his long career, he has yet to find a place he enjoys more than home.
“I found Syracuse to be a great place to live because any time an opportunity to play out of Syracuse comes up, it’s not that far,” he says. “You can fly out of here and play any place you want. And the opportunities for me to play here in Syracuse are great. And as far as teaching is concerned, I feel that the students I have up here at Syracuse University, many come here because of me and they work their tails off. They work hard. That to me is a lot of gratification. I’m able to get other people to enjoy what I enjoy.”
The gratification has come full circle for Riposo, who revels most in talking about his many students who have succeeded in music—whether he taught them as children in Liverpool or as maturing adults at SU.
Riposo especially swells with pride when he mentions Jim Spadafore, current music teacher at Liverpool High School, who will present the Music Educator Hall of Fame award to Riposo at the ceremony.
“I started him in fourth grade and now he plays in the same jazz ensemble with me,” he says. “He also teaches at the high school in Liverpool and I hired him. He finished college at Buffalo State with his master’s degree and came back to Liverpool, wanted to teach and he was a great candidate; now he sits right next to me.”
Riposo encourages his current SU students to play out with him often, emphasizing the importance of performing as part of their education. He also encourages them to call him Joe. “It breaks down a lot of the barriers,” he says. “I say my name is Joe, J-O-E.”
Keeping it personal has helped keep Riposo connected to many of his students, maintaining relationships he cherishes. “A lot of my students are out there working, living, teaching; that’s a good feeling. You know you’ve touched someone’s life. Boy, that warms you inside.”
MARCIA HAGAN
Singer Marcia Hagan starts giggling right off the bat. She’s “tickled” about winning a Sammy Hall of Fame award and can’t think of a better term to describe the feeling. “Every time I think about it, I giggle,” she explains. “And I don’t giggle. But every time I think about it I’m like, ‘Oh, stop it!’ I love when people love what you love.”
People have certainly done that. When she moved to Syracuse at age 10 with her family, she was immediately ready to hop back on the bus and return to the warmth of Alabama. They arrived in November, just in time to stick their feet into snow above their ankles. “It was so brutal,” she recalls. Hagan had seen snow before, “but never snow,” she says emphatically. “Once my uncle taught us how to do snow forts and snowballs and my mom went to the Salvation Army and got us ice skates, then I was like, ‘All right. I think I can handle this.’” Just as quickly as Hagan learned to adapt to the cold, she also figured out the music scene in Syracuse. She became the youngest and first person of color ever to be accepted into the local community choir, Syracuse Chorale, and at age 14 she was awarded a scholarship to study voice and piano with Syracuse University professors.
Although she couldn’t read music and didn’t realize her talent at the time, it became obvious that Hagan had a gift as people around her helped further her musical career. “To me, it was normal. Everybody sounded like I sounded,” Hagan says. “It was all at the teacher level. They would hear me and they would direct my actual musical path. It wasn’t anything I sought out. It was just folks were lookin’ out.”
To this day Hagan remembers “Mother” Miranda Hall from her church, Tucker Missionary Baptist Church, who took part of her Social Security checks to pay for Hagan’s piano lessons. At age 13 Hagan was given a key to the church so she could practice on the piano inside since her family didn’t own one. Once she received the scholarship to SU, her mother, Willie Mary Andrews, encouraged her to pass on the knowledge and regularly hosted more than 20 teens at their house so they could all learn what Hagan was learning.
When Hagan was 15, she started writing music and plays on her own and helped begin Soul Generation, a group of teens that performed dance dramas locally, often at the former Regent Theater, now part of the current Syracuse Stage venue, 820 E. Genesee St. When she was 17, the group traveled to Ghana, Nairobi, Kenya, Tanzania, the Ivory Coast, Italy, Germany and France for a summer, touring and sharing their talents.
“We had a lot of older artists that became involved and would come do makeup and raised enough money so 17 people could go,” she says. “They worked hard. They did things so we would have the money to go because none of us had money.”
After a few years with the group, Hagan and some friends from Soul Generation moved to New York City and once Hagan’s voice got heard, she landed a gig as a contracted background vocalist at Electric Lady Studios. “That was fun,” she says excitedly. “To get up in the morning, ‘Where you going to work? Electric Lady.’ I thought I was in heaven.”
Once Hagan, 58, came back to Syracuse things slowed as family took precedence over her musical career, but she has never given up music and writing, jumping on projects whenever she can, including a yearly appearance or two at the New York State Fair’s Pan African Village. She also teaches vocal and piano to students, adult and beginner.
But even after performing specially for Maya Angelou, Wilma Rudolph, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Whitney Young and others throughout her career, Hagan regards her induction in the Sammy Hall of Fame as the greatest accomplishment. “To do something and have somebody say, ‘Well, we love you doing it.’ This is the biggest thing to me.”
DAVID "ROCK" FEINSTEIN and 805
Sometimes David “Rock” Feinstein gets concerned about a few things. First, that his claim to fame is playing his guitar with his butt, moving it back and forth like a bath towel, as he did with the band Elf with his cousin Ronnie James Dio back in the 1960s.
Local music historian Ron Wray remembers it with a laugh, “Jack Bell {well-known concert promoter in the 1970s and 1980s} thought it was the greatest thing he ever saw.”
His other concern is that maybe his later band, The Rods, aren’t with Arista anymore because of the time he spilled a drink all over legendary record producer and music industry monster Clive Davis. “I was doing my thing, throwing the guitar around and I walked out onto the table and I must have shaken the table or kicked his drink and it went all over him,” he says shaking his head. “I don’t know if that had anything to do with it, but it might have.”
He tempers those concerns with laughter, just little stories plucked out from more than 40 years in the industry. His victories are greater.
Feinstein, who refused to reveal his age, began his career with his cousin Dio in the band Ronnie Dio and the Prophets, which later became Elf in the 1960s. Although that band alone received enough worldwide recognition to put Feinstein on the map for life as a guitarist, several years later he formed The Rods, who would continue to play together until 1986. Feinstein went on to release three solo albums in the 2000s and after taking a break with The Rods until 2005, the band regrouped and is currently touring and recording again. Their latest album is Vengeance (Niji, 2010).
Although Feinstein lives in Cortland, where he owns the famed Hollywood Restaurant, his history with Syracuse is long and full of memories. “We used to play certain clubs: that one that always got flooded, The Brookside {now the DeWitt Town Hall on Butternut Drive}, the Yellow Balloon {now Lost Horizon}. We would always come to Syracuse and play these places,” he remembers.
Feinstein formed other Syracusebased relationships as well during the years with Elf and early on with The Rods. A young singer-guitarist, Dave Porter, remembers seeing Feinstein with Elf while he was attending SUNY Cortland. “I became friends with Rock and all those guys,” Porter says. “We used to play poker every Monday night.”
The mutual admiration persists and the two are visibly excited about being inducted in the same year, considering their intertwined musical roots. But the direction Porter took after returning to Syracuse in 1975 was far removed from the gritty, hard, heavy rock of Feinstein.
Porter (photographed at right) had a band, Harpy, that started doing “weird things on stage,” he admits. The music was simpler than his next band’s would be, but the theatrical aspects of the show carried over. Pyrotechnics, 10-foot pythons and blowing things up became part of the routine. But for a variety of reasons, Harpy broke up and Porter went on the lookout “for people who were really wizards on their instruments.” After extensive auditions he found bassist Greg Liss (also called Creamo), keys player Ed Vivenzio and drummer Frank Briggs as well as guitarist, vocalist Ron Cunningham (who was with the band until 1980), and formed 805 in 1977.
Shortly after Cunningham’s departure, RCA signed the band while it was playing what Porter recalls as a “dive of a place” in Little Falls. The band enjoyed quick success with RCA and had the chance to record at Electric Lady Studios in New York City. But within a few years, the excitement faded and in 1983 they were on their own. The band continued playing with the original lineup until 1986 and other lineups until 1989. Since then there have been several reunions, but the original lineup with Porter, Liss, Vivenzio and Briggs only played a few tunes at a 2003 appearance at the Turning Stone Resort and Casino. Putting the pieces back together has been a daunting task.
“We’ve got like four hours to try to relearn these kind of complicated songs,” Porter says. “They’re in weird time signatures. If you’re playing a song that’s in 7/8, in those beats, it’s hard to make them sound smooth to begin with unless they’re played right. We’ll see how good we are after all these years.”
Although the band won’t be able to spit fire or blow things up this weekend, the stories haven’t lost their luster. Porter recalls a show where they did their usual routine at the end—a set themed to old age and death that called for a concussion bomb to go off while Porter magically changed from an old man (he’d rip off a mask and old, worn clothes) to a beautiful young man in shining white clothes. In this instance, they set off the bomb and blew off half of the club’s ceiling. Porter still recalls looking out and seeing a dazed, blinded crowd covered in debris.
“They just sat there,” he says in disbelief. “They didn’t even move.” At the end of the night Porter slunk to the bar owner’s office, fearing 805 would be banned from the club, forced to pay for the damage and denied their night’s pay.
“He {the bar owner} goes, ‘You blew half the ceiling down.’ I go, ‘I know, I’m sorry,’” Porter re-enacts. “He goes, ‘That was fucking amazing! Do you know how many people are gonna be here the next time you play?’ I was so surprised.”
It’s with fond memories of ceilings falling, bombs going off and Creamo sending fireballs rolling above the crowd (Porter claims they only had to douse Creamo once) that 805 returns, finally getting recognition for the contributions to music, theatrics and Syracuse.
Although other members couldn’t make the interview, Porter is quick to remember those who will join him on the Sammys stage for the performance on Friday night. “Unlike Rock, who is getting himself put in the Hall of Fame, it’s 805 that’s going into the Hall of Fame,” he says thoughtfully. “The other three musicians that surrounded me…I guess that was my big talent. The ability to surround myself with really incredible musicians. I pale in comparison to any of the three of them.”
RICK GARY
For almost 40 years, Rick Gary has contributed to Central New York through his extensive career in radio and television. Beginning in college at WBKY in Lexington, Ky., Gary went on to work at nearly a dozen stations in the following years, everywhere from Memphis to Boston. In Syracuse, he came to make his mark on WOLF-AM 1490, first as a news reader in 1968 (visit the WOLF tribute site to listen to his airchecks as Richard G. Flegal), then during the mid-1970s as the co-host of a popular dawn-patrol shift with Ron Bee, as both cutups offered an emphasis on get-your-crack-outta-the-sack bawdy humor, until the station’s ill-fated format switch to country in 1981 spurred their exits. Gary featured several on-air appearances of local artists such as The Dean Brothers and Todd Hobin on the WOLF morning gig.
“We just liked to piss off the program director,” Gary explains about inviting local talent on the air. “He told us no one would listen, but we invited them anyway and had a huge audience. WOLF isn’t big, but they’d come and play, and we’d have a ton of people come in and people outside. We just had fun.”
Gary worked for 23 years at local ABC affiliate WSYR-Channel 9, performing news and weather stints as well as a cooking segment on the early-morning news show. Then in 2004 Gary segued into the co-anchor chair alongside Julie Abbott on the daily infotainment series Bridge Street until he left the station in 2009. He was inducted into the New York State Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 2009 and Nottingham High School’s Wall of Fame in 2010.
However, Gary considers this Sammys honor to be one of his greatest. “When I found out I said, ‘I can’t believe it.’ I got inducted into the Broadcasters Hall of Fame, but to be recognized with the amount of talent of the Sammys—that’s a real honor for a broadcaster,” he says. “It touches me deeply. The people I’m being honored with. . . I wish I could sing a song, but I don’t think they’d want to hear it.” Also fittingly, Gary emceed The Dean Brothers’ induction into the Sammys Hall of Fame two years ago. This year, the roles will reverse as the brothers emcee Gary’s induction.
Today, Gary can still be heard afternoons on Galaxy Communications’ WZUN- FM 102.1 (Sunny 102) and WUMX-FM 102.5 (Mix 102.5) in Utica, bringing his easy personality, energy and sense of humor to the airwaves. On par with his broadcasting career, Gary has also established himself through community work as a board member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the Salvation Army and Home Aides of CNY and through his participation as co-chair of the Children’s Miracle Ride to benefit the Upstate Golisano Children’s Hospital.
SYRACUSE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
After serving the region for nearly 50 years, the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra met its end in May when the group filed for bankruptcy. The occasion was met with sadness, anger and debate, but in spite of the conflict, it is with reverence for the many contributions of the SSO that it is receiving the Syracuse New Times Lifetime Achievement Award this year.
The SSO employed 63 full-time and 16 part-time musicians to perform as the 43rd largest orchestra in the United States. The SSO performed at Carnegie Hall five times, operated two youth orchestras and various educational programs and brought some of the world’s best and brightest soloists to the stage including Yo-Yo Ma, Itzahk Perlman, Sir James Galway, LeAnn Rimes, Wynnona Judd, Michael Feinstein, Garrison Keillor, Vanessa Williams, Chuck Mangione and others. The SSO also provided the music for Syracuse Opera and local and traveling ballet companies.
The SSO’s reach touched thousands of students and classical music lovers yearly. Although the future of the orchestra is uncertain, with efforts to revive the group in various formations, the legacy will not be forgotten.
A cross section of musicians from the former SSO, including Andrew Zaplatynsky, Deborah C. Coble, Michael Bull, Ernest Muzquiz and Patricia Sharpe, will be accepting the award at the Hall of Fame ceremony on Thursday and nearly two dozen are expected to represent the organization at the Sammy Awards the following night.
For more information about the Hall of Fame Induction at Upstairs at the Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, contact Debbie Foley at dfoley442@aol.com or call 247-1718. Tickets are $20 and include a buffet as well as cash bar.
For more information on the Sammys, visit www.syracuseareamusic.com. Tickets are $15 and available online. Attendees are strongly encouraged to stay for the duration of the event and not leave after certain award-winners are called. Please have respect for every award winner and performer.
