Archives for 2008

Jazz masters in the Azores

My focus shifts to the mid-Atlantic: for the next week I’ll be hearing newly honored NEA Jazz Master Lee Konitz, pianist Joachim Kuhn, the Hot Club of Portugal Septet, reedist Marty Ehrlich’s Rites Quartet and a band led by NYC multi-instrumentalist Daniel Carter at the 10th annual Festival de Jazz de Ponta Delagada — where I’m also delivering a talk on “Jazz Now — and It’s Future” (during which I will tell all). Ponta Delgada is the largest city in the Azores, islands 700 miles west of Lisbon with a lengthy history as a port between Europe and the Americas. Reports from there to follow — and if you happen to be in the vicinity, please say hello.

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Colbert & Coleman: Name that tune

A reader asks: “Could you please post the name of the [Ornette] Coleman song sampled for that sketch” on Steven Colbert’s Comedy Central showÂ of October 9?

Colbert pulled one of his trademark reverses, ridiculing the vast emptiness of smug superiority by goofing on a 10-second snatch of the Pulitzer Prize-winning musician’s live recording Sound Grammar. Research suggests the excerpt Brother Steve C swung along to so sillily before remarking, “God, that’s unbearable. Ergo it must be good!” was from the first track on the album,Â “Jordan” (named for Coleman’s cousin and longtime consigliere James Jordan, former director of the New York State Council on the Arts’ music program).Â It seems to occur about 4 minutes 50 seconds in, at the climax of a duet of acoustic bassists Greg Cohen and Tony Falanga, driven by drummer Denardo Coleman.

Listening again, I admit an error: I don’t think Ornette’s playing violin on this, but rather it’s the interaction of the two bassists, bowing very high and walking very fast, without him on violin or sax. To hear OC’s violin in its first bloom and full glory, check out “Snowflakes and Sunshine” from his 1963 album Live at the Golden Circle, Vol. 2; for an early example of his harmolodic string concept, there’s “Dedication to Poets and Writers” from Ornette Coleman, Town Hall 1962.Â

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Live in New York, it’s jazz beyond jazz

Presentations of jazz that break all sorts of bounds, pushing far beyond stale conventions — jazz beyond jazz — are so prevalent in Manhattan that the energy expended just being on the scene can leave me too drained to report on the good stuff. Five shows in the past month –Â Dee Dee Bridgewater’s Mali project at the Blue Note, Myra Melford‘s new quartet at Roulette, Richard Bona and Lionel LouekeÂ in the Allen Room of Jazz at Lincoln Center, James “Blood” Ulmer with Vernon Reid’sÂ neo-blues band at the Jazz Standard and an evening celebrating the AACM chronicle and music of George E. Lewis at the Kitchen — while different as can be, barely hint at theÂ range of what’s happening here and now.

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Colbert’s tin ear

Steven Colbert plays a pointed dance on the funny-bone, but misled his “nation”Â unintentionallyÂ at least once Â last nightÂ in the segment “Who’s Not Honoring Me Now.” At 12 minutes into the show, he sniffed at the MacArthur Foundation’s award of a $500,000 fellowship to saxophonist Miguel Zenon, tongue-in-cheeking “Never give money to a jazz musician — they’ll just blow it on heroin and berets.”Â

Then he listened to a moment of Zenon’s mellifluous style, boppin’ along to it. But: “It’s not genius level jazz if it sounds like music,” Colbert went on; “Ask Pulitzer Prize-winning saxophonist Ornette Coleman.” Ten seconds of Ornette, from his Pulitzer-Prize winning album Sound Grammar. “God, that’s unbearable. Ergo, it must be ‘good.'”

Slight correction: the “unbearable” excerpt featured Ornette playing violin, which even for fans of jazz beyond jazz can be an acquired taste. That’s okay, we know the truth, as opposed to the truthiness, of this bit. Colbert loves jazz — enough to make fun of it.Â

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Jazz time-out of the year?

A major international jazz festival right now in Washington D.C.? How odd: Is it the End of Times? Are we fiddlin’ while Rome burns? Or could it be a new beginning?Â

Ignore the credit crisis, the vp debates, end-game positioning by the One and the Other, Rosh Hashanah and Eid, Cubs and White Sox both in the playoffs — here’s the under-promoted but highly impressive fourth annual Duke Ellington Jazz Festival, Oct. 1 – 7! Balancing Kennedy Center concerts with “jazz in the ‘hoods” Â (club and arts center gigs mostly but not only NW), sophisticated globalism with emerging artists, the best of student and local ensembles (Berklee College of Music Latin Jazz All-Stars at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts) as well as a free Sunday afternoon marathon featuring blues songsterÂ Taj Mahal, incomparable pianist McCoy Tyner, hot-hot singer Dee Dee Bridgewater, bravura bassist Christian McBride and trombonist Conrad Herwig’s Latin Side ProjectÂ on the National Mall . . . If it didn’t take months to organize events on this scale, one might suspect the DEJF is a convenient circus to distract us from uproar, uncertainty, faith-based initiatives and existential dread.

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Alaska Airlines to the rescue: Portland Jazz Fest revived

The Portland Jazz Festival, pronounced dead on September 8 due to the pullout of Seattle-based title sponsor Qwest Communications, now rises from its ashes on the wings of Alaska Airlines and an advisory board of local businesses and individuals. According to a press release issued today by PDX Jazz, the fest’s umbrella organization, “the 6th Annual Alaska Airlines Portland Jazz Festival presented by The Oregonian A&E will take place, as scheduled, Februrary 13-22, 2009.” The 10-day fest’s theme will be the 70th anniversary of Blue Note Records. Does this suggest corporate and community support for jazz is available — if you know where to find it?

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Berklee College, Boston: a jazz education mecca

Young people flock to Berklee College in Boston expecting practical education in the most under-capitalized of arts: jazz and related forms of contemporary popular music. With some 4000 enrollees pursuingÂ BA programs in composition, film scoring, production and engineering,Â music business/management, songwriting, performance, etc., Berklee is by far the largest of 160 institutions in the U.S. and another dozen internationallyÂ offering degrees and/or certificates in jazz studies, as detailed in the current (October) issue of Down Beat.

Berklee is a lively place that has involved notable musicians as facultyÂ and produced an impressive number of famed alumni. Being in the thick of it, though, you’re bound to wonder: What’s the point of this jazz education?

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Help Pandora — save online radio

The free and highly entertaining online radio website Pandora.comÂ — one of the most readily accessible portals to music you’ll probably enjoy, but never heard before — needs help from all listeners to pressure the Senate to pass a bill supportive of its continuance. At issue is the backbreaking level of royalty payments being urged on this site and others like it by lobbyists forÂ theÂ National Association of Broadcasters, those giant broadcasters (think Clear Channel) who would monopolize the airwaves with formulaic playlists promoting a low-common-denominator monoculture.Â

WhatÂ Pandora offers is better (more open. exploratory, innovative) than that, and in this case surprising supported by the Recording Industry Association of America, the group that’s been suing music downloaders on behalf of the record industry. Ridiculous as that effort is, by standing with Pandora RIAA gets it right. Take a look at Pandora founder Tim Westergren’s blogÂ for details of the grass-roots phone-in campaign that pushed favorable legislation through the House of Reps. — and sign up to protect a free ‘n’ easy way to sample music beyond whatever music you personally already are into, rather than being stuck with whatever top 100 cuts stations figure everyone can deal with. As if we are all one undifferentiated ear!

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Presidential politics and jazz: Show of hands

Google “Obama” and “jazz” and thisÂ Jazz Beyond JazzÂ postÂ comes up second! The search engine flatters, so here’s more research on the connection/support of the jazz world for the candidates, and the candidates of jazz (as a fundamental American cultural phenomenon).

This concertÂ seems indicative of most jazz musicians’ preference:

(gen’l admission: $100; vip seats and post-show reception: $250; students/seniors, $50).

Comparable eventsÂ last week in Cincinnati, OhioÂ and Oct. 12 in Kansas City MO, with Dick Gregory as keynote speaker on the occasion of his 76th birthday. This afternoon in Brooklyn, Jazz Passenger alto saxophonist/storyteller Roy Nathanson hosts a party at which attendeesÂ supporting ObamaÂ will call voters in swing-states, making the case. Further such jazz activism seems likely.

Not to be unfair to the other side: Google “McCain” and “jazz” and the top relevant result: the Senator flashing jazz hands.

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Bad news from the Northwest: Portland Jazz Fest dies

The demise of the Portland Jazz Festival was announced today by press release from its membership umbrella organization PDX Jazz, cancelling plans for February 2009 due to the pullout by title sponsor Qwest Communications. Despite concerted attempts by festival producer Bill Royston, no other funder stepped up to support the five-year-old festival’s modest budget with high returns, and the result may be due to the U.S.’s overall economic downturn.

The festival — two weeks every February starting in 2004 — filled burgeoning Portland’s boutique hotels, restaurants, wine bars, beer halls and coffee shops with local and regional fans. They came to hear headliners including Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, the SF Jazz Collective, the Bad Plus, Chick Corea and Gary Burton, Charles Lloyd and other impressive artists, along with panel discussions (which last year I helped plan) and enrichment events hosted by Portland State University, among other area institutions.Â

As produced by Royston and a small, efficient staff, the Portland Jazz Festival put this city of just over half-a-million on the international jazz map. Its ticketed and free concerts held at venues ranging from restored movie theaters to hotel ballrooms to local bars was accounted a success by enthusiastic audiences, gratified musicians and professional critics brought in from the East Coast and Canada to observe and interact with middle-aged devotees and a rising young crowd.

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Who decides who’s an NEA Jazz Master

The National Endowment of the Arts panel determining recipients of the annual Jazz Masters Fellowships is a small one. In the interest of transparency, the NEA has supplied the names of panelists who chose the class of ’09. It comprises five previously named Fellows, one “layperson,” one independent record producer, and two longtime jazz adminstrator-activists (who both happen to be honorees of the Jazz Journalists Association’s “A Team”).

Of course, if John McCain becomes president, it’s all moot (as Lee Rosenbaum reports, the GOP has no arts policy in its platform, and I remember writing to McCain during the 1980s objecting to his desire to de-fund the NEA). He’s clearly no jazz candidate — whereas Barack Obama spoke at the site of the Detroit Jazz Festival, on Labor Day, and San Francisco musicians are lining up behind him with a fundraising jam in San Francisco, October 13.

But that’s another posting: back to the NEA panelists –Â

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Meet the NEA’s new Jazz Masters

The National Endowment for the Arts’ latest class of official “Jazz Masters” includesÂ vocalist and guitaristÂ George Benson, drummerÂ Jimmy Cobb, alto saxophonistÂ Lee Konitz, harmonica and guitar playerÂ “Toots” Thielemans, trumpeterÂ Snooky” Young,Â and recording engineerÂ Rudy Van Gelder. Â All estimable choices, each receiving $25,000, opportunities to participate in photo shoots and public appearances and introductionÂ an official ceremony on October 17 at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Plus, Steve Wonder has won the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Music. Fair choices, all. These are professionals whose works sometimes are truly inspired. Â Â

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Chicago hears Ornette Coleman — This is our music

An estimated 20,000 to 30,000 listeners of all ages, genders, races, religions — Americans and visitors from abroad, too — enjoyed the directly expressive, highly personalized music of Pulitzer Prize-winner Ornette Coleman as the finale of the outdoor Chicago Jazz Festival last Sunday night. The attentive, mellow and celebratory audience response, including a standing ovation throughout the 5000 seats nearest the bandshell in Grant Park, suggested that improvisation created without a priori conventions or artificial constraints, which Coleman throughout his remarkable career has alluded to as “free jazz,” “harmolodics” and “sound grammar,” upon easy access and unpressured exposure, is as natural as breathing, feeling and talking. As Coleman declared on one of his recordings almost 50 years ago,Â This is our music.

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