FRANK GRECO, died of congestive heart failure on Nov. 2 in Hemet, California, he was 88.
Originally from Warsaw, Indiana, he learned to play the piano and organ at an early age and performed professionally throughout Illinois and Indiana before moving to California where he was the pianist for a number of Dixieland groups, including the Old Town Jazz Band, Hotsy Totsy Boys, Royale Garden Jazz Band, and the Bourbon Street Jazz Band.
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.
