April 30 -- yesterday -- was celebrated as the sixth annual International Jazz Day with a global webcast from Havana, hosted by Will Smith, headlined by pianist Herbie Hancock and including a couple of dozen top notch musicians from the U.S., Russia, Cameroon, France and Korea as well as Cuba. Did you know? Advance publicity and followup coverage has been but a dot on the attention focused on IJD last year, when President Barack Obama hosted a splendiferous Jazz Day in the White House. Considering the leader of the regime replacing Obama's … [Read more...]
How Charles Lloyd stays marvelous
During the 50 years since his breakthrough album Forest Flower (released in February 1967, recorded live at the Monterey Jazz Festival the summer before) -- comparable in some ways to The Epic success of Kamasi Washington -- saxophonist-flutist Charles Lloyd has been unusually popular for an adventurous jazzman. He showed how he's done that, accomplished a long career while expressing himself freely, with his on-tour Marvels at Chicago's Symphony Center Friday night (4/21), and it's worth unpacking. Lloyd, 79, and his empathic, considerably … [Read more...]
Butch Morris’s workbook for spontaneous composition published
The deathbed wish of composer-cornetist Lawrence Douglas "Butch" Morris (1947-2013) was that his detailed documentation of Conduction®, the method he devised to enable spontaneous composition for ensembles of literally any type employing codified hand-signals, be published in hardcover. This has come to pass. On April 24 and May 1, events in New York City will launch The Art of Conduction, an elegant workbook from art-world publisher Karma with photos of Morris and his text, making his innovative work available for use by anyone/everyone, … [Read more...]
Aretha Franklin’s got it at 75
I saw Aretha Franklin last night from the Chicago Theater's nosebleed seats, unable to make out her features but sure from the moment she first raised her voice that she's a national if not global treasure, as compelling at 75 -- her birthday was March 25 -- as half a century ago, in her breakthrough year 1967. Skinnier than she looked singing "The Star Spangled Banner" at the Lions-Viking game last year, wearing an above-the-knees, sleeveless, collarless dress of gauzy white, in a wig that fell like Michelle Obama's real hair, on gold heels … [Read more...]
Flyover country? Nonsense in jazz, politics, crime fiction
There's no such thing as "flyover country" -- except in the minds of careless or ignorant people who ought to know better. For instance: Jazz lives throughout the US and the world, not only in New York City; Illinois presidential race voters chose Hilary Clinton by a wide margin (due largely to Democratic bastion and jazz hub Chicago) although the man who beat her nationally does not seem to have much on-the-ground experience with anywhere except his own properties, and yes, the capital of the Midwest has crime fiction writers to … [Read more...]
Spring break with Budapest jazz, photos
I went to Budapest for spring break -- to introduce a photo exhibit by my Transylvanian-born friend Sánta István Csaba and help jury the 10th annual Müpa Budapest Jazz Showcase/Talent Exchange, held in the modernist musem and multi-theater complex on the east bank of the icy Danube Feb 3 - 5. As I wrote in my DownBeat article, the sound of the 12 sets I heard was jazz as we think of it now -- virtuosic horns, piano/keyboards and/or guitar, upright or electric basses and drums; vocalists singing standards, spicing up r&b grooves, … [Read more...]
Trump’s biggest first threat to the arts: Ending net neutrality
Terrible as it will be for the Trump administration to kill the National Endowments of the Arts and Humanities, gutting net neutrality seems to me an even more damaging attack on the arts, independent and upstart media and America's commons. By nominating as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission ex-Verizon lawyer and avowed net neutrality foe Ajit Pai, Trump will further commodify the internet we now all use for free, allowing biggies like Netflix and Comcast to pay for fastest service (meaning others get slower service) and … [Read more...]
Is NYC (still) capital of jazz?
The early January concurrence of the Jazz Connect conference, the annual convention of APAP (Association of Performing Arts Presenters), Global Fest and Winter JazzFest makes a good case for Manhattan being the capital of jazz-and-beyond. It's inarguably true that creative sound-organizing with improvisation and rhythm is world-wide, and our native version -- jazz and its derivatives -- thrives throughout in the US, even in places it's overlooked. And the record biz centralized in NYC, which fed this music's market segment from the '20s … [Read more...]
Patti Smith’s New Year’s Eve vow: “We must not behave!”
Ushering in 2017 with Patti Smith and band at Chicago's Park West New Year's Eve was inspiriting for us of a certain age and artsy disposition. Grey-haired but loose and limber -- funny, fierce, profane and poetically incantatory -- Smith celebrated her 70th birthday in the city of her origin as if for all boomers and our progeny. At the Riviera Theatre on Dec. 30 she performed the whole of Horses, her winning 1975 debut album; on the 31st, backed by her four-man Nuggets, she offered a mixed bag including Debbie Reynold's plaintive "Tammy," … [Read more...]
Jazz warms Chi spots: Hot House @ Alhambra Palace, AACM @ Promontory
There are good arguments for building venues just for jazz. But speaking of arts communities in general: Most are moveable feasts, fluid, transient, at best inviting to newcomers to the table. It's demonstrable that when jazz players and listeners alight at all-purpose spaces such as Chicago's Alhambra Palace, where Hot House produced the trio of saxophonist David Murray, bassist Harrison Bankhead and percussionist Kahil El'Zabar on Monday, Dec. 12, or The Promontory in Hyde Park, where flutist Nicole Mitchell, cellist Tomeka Reid and … [Read more...]
Dr. Richard Wang, enabler of AACM experimentalists, RIP
In his first college teaching job at Wilson Junior College during the early 1960s, trumpeter Dick Wang encountered a cadre of exploratory young Chicago musicians who would soon form the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians). He encouraged them. He introduced Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman and Malachi Favors, Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill, Ari Brown and others to the writings of Paul Hindemith and Arnold Schoenberg; he instituted weekly a "head-knocking" jam sessions for these players, and cheered on their efforts … [Read more...]
African roots, Middle Eastern extensions in Hyde Park Jazz Fest
Pianist Randy Weston, a magisterial musician at age 90 inspired by jazz traditions and its African basics, and trumpeter Amir ElSaffar, who has devoted himself to incorporating the Middle East's modal, microtonal maqam legacy into compositions for jazz improvisation by members of his Two Rivers Ensemble, were highlights of last weekend's 10th annual Hyde Park Jazz Festival. Both acts brought influences from afar back home. The two-day fest in the neighborhood soon to host Barack Obama's presidential library focused on local performers … [Read more...]
Chi jazz fest 2016, details in photos and words
My DownBeat overview of the 38th annual Chicago Jazz Festival, comprehensive as I could make it, didn't go into depth on any of the couple dozen performances I heard from Sept 1 through 4 in downtown Millennium Park and the Cultural Center. So here, with imagery by my photojournalist colleagues and friends Marc PoKempner and Michael Jackson (whose photo of drummer Dave King of the Bad Plus graced that DownBeat review) are some previously unreported details. Tatsu Aoki's Miyumi Project continues to evolve as the Tsukasa Taiko Legacy … [Read more...]