• Home
  • About
    • Jazz Beyond Jazz
    • Howard Mandel
    • Contact
  • AJBlogs
  • ArtsJournal

Jazz Beyond Jazz

Howard Mandel's Urban Improvisation

Archives for March 2008

Ornette at Town Hall and in Japan

Further Ornette sightings: the prophet of life-beyond-conventions returns on Friday to New York’s Town Hall, where he’s suffered and triumphed throughout his career.

[Read more…]

Out To Lunch in the zone

A one-time-only revisitation of the late Eric Dolphy‘s masterpiece at Merkin Concert Hall in NYC fulfilled the promise and hope of jazz repertory concerts, and proved the enduring, enriching quality of jazz-beyond-jazz compositions.

[Read more…]

Political poetry in Bed-Stuy

“They want the oil/but they don’t want the people,” Jayne Cortez declaimed over and over again, her inflections expressing frank assessment, sheer disbelief, scathing cynicism and many nuances in between, without ever stipulating who “they” or “the people” are. She didn’t have to, we all knew. It was Saturday night at Sistas’ Place, a storefront coffeehouse in the black Brooklyn neighborhood Bedford-Stuyvesant, where poetry reflects the inseparability of the personal and the political.

[Read more…]

Ornette speaks!

In Portland, Ornette Coleman and his drummer son Denardo sat for an hour-plus public interview with me. We talked about music, sound, love, death, race relations, progress and/or the lack of, language, the alphabet — Ornette’s frequent topics.
Here’s the whole thing, as an audio file recorded by KMHD-FM.
howardmandel.com
Subscribe by Email or RSS
All JBJ posts

flattered and bemused

The resident blogger is flattered that so many readers stick up for the rights of reviewers to do what they do. He’s also amused at one reader’s suggestion that John Zorn regards professional opinions so highly he’d prefer to suppress them.

[Read more…]

Musicians dread words

John Zorn asked writers not to review his performance opening the season at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, though he was pleased we wanted to attend. How can/should an arts journalist comply?

[Read more…]

Howard Mandel

I'm a Chicago-born (and after 32 years in NYC, recently repatriated) writer, editor, author, arts reporter for National Public Radio, consultant and nascent videographer -- a veteran freelance journalist working on newspapers, magazines and websites, appearing on tv and radio, teaching at New York University and elsewhere, consulting on media, publishing and jazz-related issues. I'm president of the Jazz Journalists Association, a non-profit membership organization devoted to using all media to disseminate news and views about all kinds of jazz.
My books are Future Jazz (Oxford U Press, 1999) and Miles Ornette Cecil - Jazz Beyond Jazz (Routledge, 2008). I was general editor of the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Jazz and Blues (Flame Tree 2005/Billboard Books 2006). Of course I'm working on something new. . . Read More…

@JazzMandel

Tweets by @jazzbeyondjazz

More Me

I'll be speaking:

JBJ Essentials

Archives

Return to top of page

an ArtsJournal blog

This blog published under a Creative Commons license