Rosetta Reitz

Archivist and historian Rosetta Reitz restored to prominence the long-forgotten woman artists so crucial to the formative advancement of American jazz and blues, reissuing their music via her very own Rosetta Information label. Delivered Rosetta Goldman in Utica, NY on Sept 28, 1924, she went to the College or university of Wisconsin ahead of functioning at Manhattan’s Gotham Reserve Mart. After marrying Robert Reitz in 1948, she opened up her very own Greenwich Community bookstore, the 4 Periods. Although her hubby and his man friends released Reitz to jazz, her burgeoning fascination with America’s musical root base coincided with her developing commitment towards the nascent feminist motion. Annoyed by the scant historic interest paid to the ladies artists therefore central towards the development of jazz and blues, she started collecting aged 78s, concentrating her initial attempts on numbers like trumpeter Valida Snow and pianist Georgia White colored. “For the reason that decade from the 1920s, when jazz really was being developed and changing from an entertainment music to an art, these women had been extraordinarily essential and instrumental in achieving that,” Reitz informed THE BRAND NEW York Occasions in 1980. “Louis Armstrong was a sideman on information in the Twenties with performers like Sippie Wallace, Eva Taylor, Hociel Thomas, Virginia Liston and Margaret Johnson. These women’s information were produced as their information. However when they turn out today, they’re reissued as Louis Armstrong information, when in fact he had not been that important with them.” Reitz’s use fellow enthusiasts and archivists eventually unearthed not merely ignored obscurities but also dropped recordings from canonized serves including Bessie Smith, Ida Cox, and Ma Rainey. After posting the reserve Menopause: AN OPTIMISTIC Strategy in 1977, Reitz lent money from close friends to start Rosetta Records. Not merely do she compile and remaster the pre-World Battle II jazz and blues series which were the label’s loaf of bread and butter, but she also explored and composed their extensive liner notes, getting close to the music from sociocultural, traditional, and feminist perspectives, as well as dug up the time photos that adorned their sleeves. Rosetta Information released a complete of 19 amounts in its Women’s Heritage Series, although Reitz originally prepared 26. Concurrently she proved helpful being a stockbroker, a teacher, and meals critic for The Community Voice, aswell as arranging concerts in the Newport Jazz Event, Carnegie Hall, as well as the Hollywood Dish. For quite some time Reitz also lobbied for any postage stamp honoring Bessie Smith, a crusade finally recognized in 1994. A suggested book on the annals of ladies in jazz continued to be unfinished during Reitz’s loss of life on November 1, 2008. She was 84.