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A guy I met long ago when he had one of the coolest jobs in the world — covering Europe from London for United Press International — died Friday morning after several years of failing health. Most people who’d heard of Dick Sudhalter knew him as a jazz trumpeter who made a handful of elegant CDs and as a major author on jazz subjects — he wrote biographies of Bix Beiderbecke and Hoagy Carmichael and the massive, somewhat controversial (simply because of its subject matter) Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, 1915-1945.
Sudhalter had gone to Europe to make music, but journalism always interested him too, and he asked UPI’s Frankfort bureau for a job after finding out that UPI, pretty much alone among major media in Europe, would, if it could spoon a couple of beans from the bottom of the bowl, hire someone on the spot. By the mid-70s he’d left UPI and was back in the States.
