JACK IMEL, 84 on April 30 in Springville, California. Tap-dancing marimba player, singer, and television producer with the Lawrence Welk Show for 25 years (1957-82).
A native of Portland, Indiana and a tap dancer since the age of four, he was given unique instruments to play on the Welk show, such as bells, the triangle, ukulele, and the maracas, and did specialty song-and-dance numbers. He wrote a book about his years with Welk in 2013.
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.
