Annie Ross, who died July 21 at age 89, sold "Loch Lomond" as a seven-year- old in the Little Rascals with brass equal to her hero in "Farmers Market" hawking beans. The child of Scottish vaudevillians, she was maybe never shy. In 2002 I reported on her last stand with fellow vocalese icon Jon Hendricks, at the Blue Note in Manhattan for the newspaper City Arts. https://youtu.be/_enNo0qFxm8 The second-to-last set ever to be sung by Hendricks and Ross, two-thirds of the vocal trio once hailed as "the hottest new group in jazz" was … [Read more...]
Love movies, jazz, and thinking about them? A treat
Movies, jazz and reading remain my favorite solitary diversions, and Fresh Air critic Kevin Whitehead enables immersion in all three with Play The Way You Feel: The Essential Guide to Jazz Stories on Film, his entertaining, provocative, deeply informed look at some 120 flicks and a handful of tv shows relating tales that mirror or inform American culture. From The Jazz Singer (1928), long cited as the first motion picture with sound (it wasn't exactly, but launched the form) to Bolden, a too-little distributed imagining of the first … [Read more...]
Four months of jazz adaptation, resilience, response to epidemic
In early March - only four months ago - I flew between two of the largest U.S. airports, O'Hare and JFK, to visit New York City. I stayed in an East Village apt. with my daughter and a nephew crashing on her couch. The Jazz Standard (DoNYC) We ate barbecue at a well-attended Jazz Standard performance by drummer Dafnis Prieto's sextet, and the next day I went to a celebration of Ornette Coleman's birthday, his demise five years ago and his ongoing spirit, hosted by his son Denardo at the Coleman's midtown loft. Noted improvisers David … [Read more...]
Revered jazz elders, deceased: portraits by Sánta István Csaba
As a generation of jazz elders leaves our world -- some hastened by the pandemic -- their faces as photographed by Sánta István Csaba become even more luminous, haunting, iconic. Guiseppi Logan, multi-instrumentalist (May 1935 - April 2020) Henry Grimes, bassist (Nov 1935 - April 2020) Pianists Geri Allen (June 1957 - June 2017) and McCoy Tyner (Dec 1938 - March 2020) Wallace Roney, trumpeter (May 1960 - March 2020) Lee Konitz, alto saxophonist, improviser (Oct 1927 - April 2020) Bucky Pizzarelli, guitarist (Jan 1926 - April … [Read more...]
Future Jazz past: Hal Willner, circa 1992
The death of funny, smart, idiosyncratic, unique music producer Hal Willner at age 64 saddens me. Hal Willner, photo by David Andrako We were East Village neighbors in the go-go '90s, flush with ideas to try in the future. Here's my entry about him from Future Jazz (Oxford U Press, 1999). CONCEPT PRODUCER AS VISIONARY "My projects happen mostly by accident," claims Hal Willner, soundtrack producer of Robert Altman's films including Short Cuts, based on short stories by the late American "dirty realist" writer Raymond Carver … [Read more...]
JazzOnLockdown: Musicians, venues, .orgs — writers? — turn to live-streaming
It's the most obvious, available and so far low-cost option for anyone who can cast a performance online for public consumption -- jazz musicians specifically included: Live-streaming. Fred Hersch has been first out of the box, committing to live-streaming daily mini concerts from his living room, 1pm Eastern Daily Time (10am PST, 7pm in Europe) -- https://www.facebook.com/fredherschmusic. As New York, California, Illinois and other U.S. locales request and/or require a suspension of public gatherings, the personal … [Read more...]
Jazz vs. lockdown: Blogs w/ vid clips defy virus muting musicians
image by John Fenton Jazz doesn't want to stay home and chill -- so members of the Jazz Journalists Association launched on Monday, 3/15/2020, JazzOnLockdown: Hear It Here, a series of curated v-logs featuring performance videos of musicians whose gigs have been postponed or cancelled due to coronavirus concerns. The initial JOL post, by Madrid blogger Mirian Arbalejo (of MissingDuke.com) is dedicated to Marcelo Peralta, Argentine born/Spanish resident saxophonist-composer-arranger who is reportedly the first jazz musician to succumb to … [Read more...]
Mardi Gras’ lewd Krewe, Marc Pokempner’s photos
Krewe du Vieux Carré puts on the most satirical and scatalogical of New Orlean's pre-Mari Gras parades, says photo-journalist Marc PoKempner, whose images © here provide convincing evidence. PoKempner writes: "Our dysfunctional evil-clown-in-chief figured prominently in this years’ Krewe du Vieux parade and the immediately following krewedelusion -- an annual outpouring of satirical, political, scatological and outrageous imagery that can always be counted on to top the charts of the crude, lewd and rude. At once the most topical and … [Read more...]
A dip into Mexico City street music and avant-garde
Here's writing I worked hard on last year, published in slightly different form as a "Global Ear" column in The Wire (UK) December 2019. Rafael Arriaga's photos (unless credited otherwise) are a fit complement, as is Jazzamoart's painting, "El Bop de los Alebrijes." El Bop de los Alebrijes, © Jazzamoart The Harmonipan players, khaki-uniformed men and women grinding away for spare change on out-of-tune, ill-repaired 100-year-old portable German organs in the midst of Mexico City's car-jammed boulevards, were the most surprising element … [Read more...]
Chicago Jazz fest images, echoes
Roscoe Mitchell onscreen, presiding over The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Pritzker Pavillion Millennium Park Chicago, 8/30/19photo (c) Marc PoKempner The 41st annual Chicago Jazz Festival has come and gone, as I reported for DownBeat.com in quick turnaround. I stand by my lead that the music was epic -- cf. Marc PoKempner's beautiful image of the Art Ensemble of Chicago at Pritzker Pavillion, facing east towards Mecca just before their African percussion-driven orchestral set. And epochal, yes: the Art Ensemble is 50 years old, as discussed … [Read more...]
Transcending Toxic Times with street poetry & music
My DownBeat article about Transcending Toxic Times, the compulsively listenable, critically political album by the Last Poets produced by electric bassist/composer Jamaaladeen Tacuma, includes a lot of quotes from my interviews with him and poet Abiudon Oyewale. from left: Baba Donn Babatunde, Jamaaaladeen Tacuma (in front), Umar Bin Hassan, Abiodun Oyewole I reproduced some of the searing imagery/lyrics on the recording, and provided background on how these men have been calling out American mendacy and hypocrity for half-a-century, as … [Read more...]
Dr. John, Back in the Day and Blindfolded
Dr. John the Night Tripper -- Mac Rebbanack, New Orleans' musical fabulist, dead June 6 at age 77 -- dazzled me at one of the first rock shows I recall attending, at Chicago's Aragon Ballroom circa 1969. Dr. John, Vienna 2011, photo by Sánta István Csaba I was then enthralled by Gris-gris, his murky, obscure and carnivalesque debut album, having never heard anything like it (and I still haven't -- thanks perhaps to the great, less- heralded producer Harold Battiste). I was thrilled to Blindfold Test Mac for DownBeat in 1984. He came … [Read more...]
Black Chicago music fest producers: The costs of “free”
Chicago offers, surprisingly enough, many opportunities to catch exciting, accomplished and emerging music across genres, with oodles of concerts free of charge, meaning they have to funded by others than attendees. Our extraordinary summer events season launched last weekend with the city-sponsored, all-free 34th Annual Chicago Gospel Festival in Millennium Park and I'm psyched for the 36th Annual Chicago Blues Festival next weekend (planning to somehow dart off to the Printers Row Lit Fest, simultaneously at the opposite end of the Loop) as … [Read more...]