RICHARD HAWK, 82, on March 4 from a heart attack in Overland Park, Kansas. A successful entrepreneur who headed numerous ventures in the fields of education, financial services, aviation, and publishing.
As an avid jazz musician and historian, he built the Country Club Hotel in Lake Ozark, Missouri where Lynn Zimmer and the Jazz Band performed. More recently, he opened the Gaslight Grill in Leawood, Kansas, site of his weekly jazz broadcasts on local radio.
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.
