Bob Byler, 87, passed away on April 28th in Venice Florida. He was a traditional jazz superfan who was well respected in the Dixieland community for his decades of writing for The Mississippi Rag and other publications. He was also a videographer who, along with his wife Ruth, who passed last year, taped hundreds of hours of concert footage at jazz festivals around the world.
These were not the three minute cellphone videos we've come to expect from concert footage, but full shows, filmed from tripods, and going back as far as the 1980s. In many cases he captured combinations of musicians that are not preserved anywhere else. In recent years he concerned himself with making sure that this amazing resource would be available to future generations To that end he began indexing his videos and pictures online. He created a Youtube page of his videos and a Flickr page of his thousands of photographs from festivals.
Their will be a celebration of Bob and Ruth's lives possibly tied in with the Clearwater Jazz Festival in November. We will publish a longer remembrance in our June issue. In the meantime he expressed hope in his last days that people would utilize the pages he created.
Please visit:
Bob and Ruth Byler Archival Jazz Videos
Byler Jazz Photos
Here is an article about his passing run in his local newspaper, it is not available online.
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