Pianist Cecil Taylor -- who yesterday I might have described as "preeminent" rather than "predominant" -- read his erudite, sound-sensitive poetry in the first half of his sold-out 80th birthday concert at Merkin Hall, then performed solo sonatas for approximately 50 minutes. An infant in the audience occasionally cooing along with Taylor's precise diction made it difficult to catch every word (much less all the meaning) of his texts, filled as they were with the recondite references to biology, mathematics, Egyptian and Mayan … [Read more...]
Cecil Taylor, unique and predominant, 80 years old
March 27, 2009 by
Cecil Taylor is the world's predominant pianist by virtue of his technique, concept and imagination, and one of 20th-21st Century music's magisterial modernists. A figure through whose challenges I investigate the avant garde in Miles Ornette Cecil -- Jazz Beyond Jazz, he turned 80 on March 25 (or maybe on the 15th), and tonight, Saturday, March 28, "Cecil Taylor Speaks Volumes" -- and presumably performs solo -- at Merkin Concert Hall.Taylor belongs to no school but his own yet has influenced and generated a legion of followers on piano … [Read more...]
Reasons to be cheerful: Wynton books Ornette
March 18, 2009 by
Wynton Marsalis has high regard for the music of Ornette Coleman -- as demonstrated by Jazz at Lincoln Center's just-released 2009-2010 concert schedule, which begins next September 26 with a single performance by Coleman's quartet featuring two bassists and his son Denardo on drums. This booking might seem like a point of departure for JALC, which has a reputation for being tradition- rather than innovation-minded, but it really isn't. The Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra performed its members' original arrangements of Pulitzer Prize-winning … [Read more...]
Wein’s jazz fest without JVC Corp
March 17, 2009 by
Calling all jazz sponsors: that's the message producer George Wein released today (March 17) in search of corporate support for his proposed 55th anniversary Newport Jazz Festival.So doing, Wein also announced the end of a 24-year association with JVC Corp., the electronics manufacturer that has been title sponsor of fests formerly staged by Wein's company Festival Productions in New York, Chicago, LA, Concord CA, Miami and Paris. If JVC has pulled out of sponsoring jazz fests -- and not just disassociating with Wein -- the effect will be … [Read more...]
Happy Birthday, Fred Anderson
March 15, 2009 by
Fred Anderson, tenor saxophonist, is one of America's less-acknowledged Jazz Masters, a man of deep musicality who has had enormous influence on three generations of players and listeners drawn by his brawny, free-wheeling Chicago sound. He turns 80 on March 22, and a weeklong celebration at the Velvet Lounge, his music room on the near-South Side, starts tonight, March 15, with the AACM Great Black Music Ensemble. A founding member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, Anderson stayed home when the Art Ensemble of … [Read more...]
PBS fundraising week: jazz & soul tv abounds
March 11, 2009 by
What gets New Yorkers to watch and/or contribute to PBS? Jazz, blues, r&b -- American vernacular music, of course.I assume it's time for WLIW's spring fundraiser, for instance, because "New York Public Television" has scheduled for one evening (March 11) of prime time the smooth r&b couple Ashford and Simpson in performance at Feinstein's at Loews Regency; photogenic trumpeter Chris Botti performing with John Mayer, Josh Groban, Steve Tyler and the Boston Pops, and the 1959 broadcast "The Sound of Miles Davis," featuring music from … [Read more...]
Recent NEA grants-getters win again in Arts Recovery act
March 4, 2009 by
The National Endowment of the Arts' first program of the Obama "Recovery Act" focuses on the preservation of jobs in the arts. But it upholds an adage quoted by Billie Holiday in "God Bless the Child": "Them that's got shall get." Applicants must be organizations that have received NEA grants during the immediately prior four years (since 2006). The NEA's announcement is crystal clear:[R]ecogniz[ing] that the nonprofit arts industry is an important sector of the economy the Arts Endowment has designed a plan to expedite distribution of … [Read more...]
George Wein to produce Newport jazz & folk fests
March 3, 2009 by
George Wein will celebrate the 55th anniversary of the historic Newport Jazz Festival and the 50th anniversary of his equally renown Newport Folk Festival by producing both a jazz fest and a folk fest in that Rhode Island resort town next August, according to a press release issued on March 3 by publicist Carolyn McClair -- but perhaps without his sponsor of 25 years and independent of the company he helped establish just two years ago.Wein, age 83, a pianist and memoirist as well as impresario, has put on jazz and folk fests in Newport, and … [Read more...]
Blunt notes from casual CD listening — reactions, not reviews
March 1, 2009 by
On Saturday, while making chopped liver for a dinner party and emptying a bookcase in need of repair, I listened to and commented on Facebook about 14 cds from the stacks of dozens of albums that have arrived since the first of the year seeking my review. I chose what I heard almost at random, pulling discs from the tops of piles, and rather than pre-selecting artists in whom I have established interests and prior knowledge, I mostly checked out people and groups I hadn't encountered before (I acknowledge a couple exceptions). I employed this … [Read more...]
