Retired after 25 years and multiple commendations, former New York City Transit Authority bus driver Barry Baldwin now has the time to delve into his favorite pastimes. These include a wide range of music interests, particularly in jazz, blues, rock, pop, and rhythm and blues. For New York’s Barry Baldwin and other fans, R&B remains a vibrant form of musical expression, and one of the signature genres in the history of American music.Musicologists typically trace the origin of rhythm and blues to the jump blues popular at the close of the 1940s, and ultimately to early African American spirituals. R&B, with its blues chords and drumming backbeat, changed its parent genre by putting greater emphasis on the lyrics and less on the instrumentation. R&B itself would morph into soul music, and into early rock and roll.In the 1950s, R&B produced a host of notable individual singers, like Etta James, Fats Domino, and Ray Charles, and groups like the Drifters, the Platters, and Little Anthony and the Imperials. Today, numerous well-known artists incorporate elements of traditional R&B into their work. These include Alicia Keys, John Legend, and Erykah Badu.
A multi-awarded bus driver commended for his public service, Barry Baldwin served with the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority until 2014. He was the recipient of accolades for his attention to safety and to the rights of disabled passengers. Now retired, Barry Baldwin has been able to deepen his interest in music, particularly in jazz, blues, R & B, pop, and rock. A quote attributed to the great jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong said that, if someone had to ask what jazz is, they would never be capable of knowing. In 2000, the popular and widely acclaimed documentary filmmaker Ken Burns tried to answer that question with another in his series of monumental PBS documentaries, simply titled Jazz.The 10-part, 19-hour series attempts to encapsulate jazz - with its blend of free-form lines, grit, melancholy, and boundless optimism - as a quintessentially American art form. Moreover, an art form that brought white and African-American performers and listeners together in a celebration of the joy of music through some of the most virulent decades of racism of the last century. The series is not without its critics, many of whom found it overly ambitious and overly selective in the narratives included. Burns, himself not deeply musically inclined, initiated the project at the suggestion of famed trumpeter and jazz ambassador Wynton Marsalis, who became a driving force behind the production. Burns and his team would conduct vast amounts of archival research for the series, which featured Marsalis on camera as an expert commentator.
