Howard Mandel by Susan BrinkTerri Lyne Carrington by C. Andrew HovanOrbert DavisMarc Ribot by Sandlin Gaither
HOST [Lawrence Peryer]: Hello and welcome to The Buzz, the podcast of the Jazz Journalists Association, an international professional organization of writers, photographers, and broadcasters focused on jazz. I’m Lawrence Peryer, proud JJA member and managing editor of The Buzz. Today we have JJA president Howard Mandel hosting a compelling discussion on political activism in jazz with three remarkable musicians who have dedicated their careers to both artistic excellence and social change.
Our first guest is Terri Lyne Carrington, the four-time Grammy-winning drummer, composer, and producer who serves as founder and artistic director of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice. An NEA Jazz Master and Doris Duke Artist, Terri Lyne has spent four decades advocating for women, transgender, and non-binary musicians while reimagining jazz’s aesthetic possibilities.
Joining her is Orbert Davis, the Emmy Award-winning trumpeter, composer, and educator who co-founded the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic. He’s host of The Real Deal with Orbert Davis on WDCB-FM and .org, and has built an extraordinary cultural bridge through his Immigrant Stories concert series and his groundbreaking collaborations with Cuban musicians. His work transforms jazz into a vehicle for international understanding and social healing, initiating a New Third Stream.
Our third guest is Marc Ribot, the innovative guitarist whose extensive collaborations include work with Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, and John Zorn. Beyond his acclaimed recording and touring career, Marc has emerged as a fierce advocate for musicians’ economic rights through his organizing work with the Content Creators Alliance and efforts to reform the American Federation of Musicians.
Together, these three artists explore what jazz activism means today, from challenging gender inequities and supporting immigrant communities to fighting for fair compensation and workers’ rights. Their conversation reveals how jazz continues to serve as both artistic expression and instrument of social change.
And so now I bring you Howard Mandel, Terri Lyne Carrington, Orbert Davis, and Marc Ribot.
HM: You all engage in something that could be considered activism, jazz activism. And let’s start by defining the terms. Does that term jazz activism mean anything to you guys? Mark, can we start with you?
MR: Let’s chop it down even further to the term activism. There’s a great essay by the activist Astra Taylor called “Against Activism.” And what she says to make it short is, “I’m not an activist, I’m an organizer.” You don’t get points for being active, you get points for winning. And to do that, we have to not just act blindly, we have to organize. So I think to get back to your question, I think there’s a place for jazz and a lot of other types of organizing, and I hope we can shed some light on what that might be.
HM: Thank you, yes. Terri Lyne, what would you have to say about this?
TLC: Yes, I just agree with Marc. I don’t particularly label myself anything. I think that we see what’s needed, and if we have the courage and the time, we step in and we do what we can. And I think it’s just about respecting humanity, the humanity of others. An organizer or an activist, I’m just trying to do something good.
HM: Orbert, how do you look at this?
OD: It’s interesting. Years ago there was a write-up in the Chicago Tribune in which I was described as a jazz activist. And I never in a million years would have thought of myself as that. I just do what I do, love what I do, and try to spread the joy. But that really was a turning point for me to understand that it’s the effect of the music, the power of the music, and the power of the people that are organized around the music that activism is an outcome, whether one is smart enough to see it and identify it or not.
HM: The reason that I thought of all of three of you is because you’ve been active and organized about addressing certain issues that are beyond the purely musical element of jazz. Orbert, with your Chicago Jazz Philharmonic, you’ve done a lot of work with Cuban students and gone to Cuba and really developed a fantastic relationship there. Terri Lyne, you’ve really instituted an important center for thinking about and dealing with issues of jazz and gender complications. And Marc, you’ve done music that is specifically about political subjects, as well as working to better the situation for musicians in payment situations with your content creators coalition, among other things. I know that this has been a central interest of yours for a long time.
Are there people that you look at in jazz prior to your work who are inspirations, have been inspirations about how they engage with social issues?
TLC: We can look historically, from Billie Holiday, Max Roach, John Coltrane, and Louis Armstrong creating the moments when the music itself had to spread a message and kind of get people on track to understand certain things.
Jazz activism has always been alive. There’s so much more work to do, especially in our current situation that we find ourselves in. I would say that so many people have inspired me in that way. Right now, I’m thinking a lot about Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln because I reimagined their classic We Insist! album. And it’s crazy that we’re still talking about the same things that they were talking about in 1960. And some of the themes have changed, of course. But the foundation of what they were talking about is still relevant.
And that movie that came out, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, it was just wild to see that scene where they went into the UN and where they were screaming and Abbey and some other women were screaming.
It was a very powerful scene to me because as much as I don’t put my body on the line as much as some of our predecessors have. So I’m inspired by people that were willing to go to jail, that were willing to make much bigger sacrifices than I feel that I have.
HM: It’s interesting that the institution of Berklee College supports your endeavors in this regard. And that’s a big change from historical jazz activism.
TLC: I just feel like we’re at a time where these institutions really have to look at what’s important to them. And if a college like Berklee, which is the leading contemporary music college in the world, if they want to stay that way, they have to really address what’s contemporary and the themes and the concerns of their students. And I think they have the freedom to do more so than some institutions. So I don’t think it was a big stretch necessarily to do. There was also a crisis at the college at the time with some accusations of sexual harassment, assault. I had been talking about this institute for a couple of years, but I think sometimes when there’s crisis, there’s also opportunity.
HM: Marc?
MR: I saw that film you mentioned, Terri. Was it Prelude to a Coup d’etat. was that the name of it? And that scene was amazing where they bum-rushed the UN. It was incredible. But also I have to tell you, don’t worry, Terri Lyne, we’re all going to get a chance to be arrested. So don’t feel bad. We don’t need to feel any nostalgia for earlier periods of history, the way things are going, unfortunately.
Well, if we’re throwing names into the ring, I’m going to have to put in Bob Cranshaw, the late Bob Cranshaw. I want to put him in because Bob Cranshaw was, of course, a legendary jazz bass player, but he was much more.
We can’t treat jazz as something that’s isolated from the larger world of the music industry. So Bob Cranshaw made a lot of his bread by being in a television orchestra for, what was that kid’s show? Sesame Street. Yeah, for years. And so what that meant, just a regular gig. He was still doing his jazz gigs at night and playing with everybody. But he lined up a pension that wound up getting him, I don’t know, something, a serious amount of money every month.
AFM members vote, 1947, photo by William Gottlieb, from William Gottlieb Collection
And he used that ability [to navigate the business] when he got older. He volunteered a lot of time to try to create a liaison towards jazz musicians and Local 802 of the AFM [American Federation of Musicians, the musicians’ union]. And ultimately, in spite of what I have to say are his heroic efforts, ultimately this failed.
I mean, sure, there’s a jazz committee and sure there’s everything else, but the majority of jazz musicians or the large majority of young musicians don’t know the union exists and it has not [necessarily been effective for them] … For those who record on major labels, we’ve benefited in a major way. For those who do union gigs, there are major benefits. But for the average musician who’s out there hustling, for the average student of yours, Terri Lyne, at Berklee, who’s going to be out there hustling in a few years, it doesn’t make any difference. And I mention that not to diss the union, but because I don’t think we have to just accept that. I think there are things we can do.
HM: The musicians’ union has been a powerful force, not always progressive, as I understand it. Can you talk a little bit more about that, Marc? Because we think about the union as possibly being a center for activism in some way.
MR: I’m sure that Orbert and Terri are aware of that most of the union was segregated up until pretty late in the game. When you see that word “amalgamated” in front of a union’s, it means it was that the Black and white locals were merged by court order. And in the case of the musicians’ union, that didn’t occur in some locals like Los Angeles until 1968 or ’69. So you’re right, it has a very mixed history.
On the other hand, that led in Chicago and Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and in a number of other cities to the creation of very strong Black locals that, I don’t know, when you talk to the older cats, like there was some kind of mixture of fear and respect. In other words, these locals kept alive the idea that when you play a gig or make a record, you’re supposed to get paid. When somebody shows up with a camera or wants to put it in a movie, you’re supposed to get paid something else.
A book that was issued recently on jazz in Pittsburgh, Jazz on the Hill by Colter Harper, that talks a lot about that history. I think there are things that can be done to either demand that the AFM change the things that have prevented it from serving not only most jazz musicians, but most indie musicians. Most of us who record for indie labels and work the recording-related touring circuits. And I think if they don’t do it, we need to start our own union. I think we need a union.
HM: So activism or organizing can be applied to everything from professional interests to international interests. Again, to go back to Orbit’s work with the people from Cuba, maybe you could talk about how that was initiated, Orbert, and what some of the challenges have been?
OD: It all started, the orchestra had been around for about 20 years now, which I’m every day surprised because it’s a labor of love. It’s the most difficult thing I’ve ever done in my life because we put an orchestra together. We needed a composer. So guess who’s the composer?
HM: The Chicago Jazz Philharmonic, you’re talking about.
OD: So we did the project in Poland, thanks to a dear friend of ours, Lauren Deutsch [photographic artist, at the time executive director of the Jazz Institute of Chicago]. And we said, this is pretty cool because Chicago has been good to us, but we could only really afford to do one or two concerts a year because of the cost of using professional musicians and everything (speaking of the union). But then we hit this thing in Poland that was like, this is cool, let’s do this. A couple of years later, we get the opportunity to go to Cuba.
But the thing about Cuba is I never realized that this experiment would transform my life and totally put me on the path of what we can call activism. There’s not a day that goes by without my having a conversation with now the hundreds of kids that have been through our program. I can’t even call it a program. They’re intersections, I’ll put it that way.
So to tell the story just very quickly: I’m a composer, so I was commissioned to do a work with River North Dance where Frank Chavez, who [was] the artistic director and choreographer, is Cuban-American. He said he’s always wanted to do a Cuban-American project, so we said, great, let’s team up. But we’ve got to go to Cuba. Definitely.
So while there, we visited the University of the Arts, and that’s when I first encountered these amazing students just by working with one trumpet player in a room, and pretty soon like 50 kids come running in and we start jamming. We just played “Night in Tunisia” for an hour. And as we left, we promised that we’d go back.
And we happened to go back in December of 2014. [While we were there] Someone tapped me on the shoulder, our translator, and said, “Hey, there’s something happening between our countries right now.” And it was right when President Obama and Castro were announcing the normalization of relationships. So imagine: like we go from strangers to becoming friends, really enemies to becoming friends. That weekend, my business partner and co-founder Mark Ingram, we were on 60 Minutes with Scott Pelley because we were the only people with Cuban reaction.
But what happened in those [rehearsal] rooms — and fortunately that happened at the beginning of the week, so we went through two or three days of rehearsal with this sense of celebration –that what these kids’ grandparents had hoped for, we were doing in the room.
So fortunately, because of having a great president with vision, I’ll say that, the next year we were able to bring 30 of those kids to Chicago to perform with the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic orchestra. We put together a 100-piece orchestra at the Auditorium Theatre, and that alone changed so many lives.
So fast forward, I’ve been to Cuba about 13 times since then, and just last January we performed. We put together another orchestra at the university and performed at the Havana Jazz Festival. But it’s not as much about the performance as it is about what happens in those rehearsals. And that’s where what I’ve learned is — I myself, I’ll start with me — I’ve learned so much about what it means to be human from the Cuban experience. And being an African-American, I’ve learned to parallel the African-American experience to the African-Cuban experience, and there’s so much richness that I could talk for six hours about it. But I’ll just say that it’s transformed me and it’s transformed a lot of lives. We just had a couple of students [from Cuba] come to Chicago and graduate to get their master’s degree, and so that’s been 12 years. And again, we’re still family because of it. That’s fantastic.
HM: So Terri Lyne, talk a little bit about what the people involved in the Institute for Jazz and Gender Justice go through, and what are some of the issues that they’re addressing and some of the maybe victories or growth that you’ve seen [since its opening in 2018].
TLC: We started off as really trying to serve the students at Berklee because I was just starting to hear some stories that were very upsetting, people that were quitting, that were very talented, but just didn’t have the support they needed from their professors. So that was the beginning. And then I realized what’s really needed is a cultural shift. We can change things within these walls here at Berklee, but it’s really a cultural shift that’s needed because for too long, women have not been supported. We’ve had extra burdens. You’ve had to be a certain kind of woman to succeed, one that plays just as good as the next guy, but that’s not really inviting a different aesthetic into the music.
Jazz has always been — aesthetically, sonically — pretty hyper-masculine. And the successful women were the ones that were able to fit into that existing fabric and texture of the music. What we started asking is, wow, what would the music have sounded like? How would it have developed if the contributions of women were in the fabric of it from the beginning?
Now we have an opportunity to open our ears and our minds to start to be able to possibly hear differently and feel a different presence in the music. Because yes, we do have different experiences and different feelings about things. And I think that voice is pretty void in the music. I’m speaking mostly about instrumental jazz, of course. Women have always been in the front singing, but that’s been an unspoken narrative, that women sing jazz and men play it.
And I have to look at, if I look at my career, I have to look at what did I squash in my own musical development and artistry in order to fit into what has been deemed “great”? And these are the things I would talk with when we had a trio with Geri Allen and esperanza spalding. Those are the things we started to talk about. Why did that trio feel different to us? And to me, it didn’t feel any different because I was so acclimated to assimilating. But Geri and esperanza would talk about, say they felt something different because somehow they didn’t feel as scrutinized or they didn’t feel as these extra burdens and weights that we may carry in all-male situations.
[In those] You’re low-key, always protecting yourself, always socially fitting into something. You can’t be too feminine or you can’t be too masculine. You have to walk this line of what’s accepted. Too feminine. You can’t be too masculine. You have to walk this line of what’s acceptable as a woman in a male-dominated space. Constantly.
I started thinking about all the women who don’t have a personality like me and felt out of place, or didn’t feel like who they were authentically was really accepted. So those were the questions I had to start answering, because if I wasn’t trying to look at that, then I feel like I was part of the problem. Because I was regurgitating the same things, telling my female students, “No, just hit harder, play stronger. No, don’t cry.” All these things that you would tell a boy, too, in general, because you have to be tough.
[An alternative, non-masculine point of view] doesn’t mean you don’t work hard. It just means let people come to the table as their authentic selves. And can we all just start to imagine a different aesthetic in the music, not replacing anything, but adding something that could be valuable to the future of jazz and valuable in a sense of helping music reach its greatest potential?
HM: Marc, I’m going to put you on the spot here because you’ve played in some pretty hyper-masculine ensembles, Jack McDuff, Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, and your own sounds of Ceramic Dog and some pretty tough music. How do you see the cross-gender relations? And we’ve seen so much development in feminism, post-modern feminism. How does this operate for you?
MR: I think that I’ve started to become aware, and I thank Terri Lyne and others for making me more aware of the necessity of reconsidering all these things. I’ve been paid a lot of attention to some things in the music, but I may have neglected that in this most recent band. I just got off the road with the quartet Hurry Red Telephone, with Ava Mendoza, but I couldn’t help but thinking we shared a bill in San Sebastián Jazz Festival with Dee Dee Bridgewater and her band We Exist. She was working with an all-female band and slamming, absolutely slamming.
But I couldn’t help but thinking that the entire next two bands, other than like a multi-artist night of flamenco music in which there are some amazing female musicians, but they were all male. So again, it’s not just the, I think it’s not just the responsibility of women in music to try to make this change happen. I think it’s all of our responsibility, and I think I need to do better.
TLC: You’re not doing too bad. It’s not like you’re exploiting women, I don’t think, with your music. And a lot of your repertoire really speaks to progressive causes or opposition to tyranny and bigotry.
MR: I’ll add to that. I think since this seems to be my job on most panels, I need to point out that for both in terms of race and gender, we got to look at it intersectionally because there’s a money issue involved. And I am conscious at every moment, like when we added, when we created minimums at the Winter Jazzfest, that every time pay for an entry-level festival goes up, every time the cost of producing a record goes down — in other words, because you get a record budget or you get fair treatment in producing record, that enables more women and more Black people and people of color who are historically and economically have less family wealth than white males. These issues are racial, and we can’t, when I hear these people say, you know, when I hear these people say, “Man, just DIY, man, make your own record,” I say, “That’s cool if you have the money to make your own record. That’s cool if you can not work for four months while you are writing, rehearsing, recording, mixing, editing, sequencing, doing the cover art for your record. But it’s not cool if you don’t.”
OD: We recently produced a gala for the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic, and the focus of the gala was Hazel Scott as one of the founders of Third Stream music. And so this is, I think, part of the revelation going back into our jazz history to see where the women and people who’ve been marginalized flourished and didn’t necessarily get the attention that they might have if they didn’t have the demographic that they did.
HM: Orbert, can we talk a little bit more about Hazel Scott as an activist?
OD: We talk a little bit more about Hazel Scott as an activist. The first thing I have to say is that I never really heard of her until our executive director Laura Rice brought her to my attention. I guess I’d seen the videos of her playing two pianos, left hand, right hand piano, and also the classical pieces that she played, but I never knew the depth of who she was musically, of course, or that she was the first African-American woman to have her own TV show.
But then when I started digging deeper into who she was. Her biographer, Karen Chilton, wrote an amazing book that I hope will become a screenplay for a movie one day about her life. But to know that she was the ultimate activist, and the fact that she was married to [New York City Congressman] Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and that put her in the limelight of social activism and racial equality… But also the fact that she was blending classical and jazz, which, again, was definitely unheard of.
The way that she got there was that I think it was Billie Holiday referred her to play at a club, and they were scrutinizing every piece that she wanted to play. And they said, don’t play that, don’t play that. No, you can’t play that, you can’t play that. But then she decided to start just playing classical music and then changing it and started swinging and changing the form and the textures and whatnot. And that kind of became the person that she would become.
And unfortunately, because of living in America at that time, she was ostracized and ended up having to move to Europe. And that’s where her career pretty much ended, because that’s when there was less emphasis on swing and more emphasis on bop and smaller bands and things like that. It’s time that she gets the recognition that she deserves.
MR: I think that demonstrates how activism has always been implicit in jazz in some ways. The adaptation of materials, the absorption of materials, and then transformation of them through a personal perspective. And as you say, she was actually persecuted by the Red Squad, by the Joseph McCarthy’s campaign, horrendous campaign in the early 1950s to root out what he thought was rebellious communism and all this scary stuff.
HM: It’s interesting that as Terri Lyne said earlier, it’s hard to imagine that these very same things are happening today. Okay, so what more can we do about it? Have you talked to colleagues? Are you trying to, or do you see that there’s more of a sense of urgency to address issues, social issues amongst your musician colleagues now? Not to be afraid of being silenced? Just continue, wanting to do what we do?
TLC: I always tell them to listen with their eyes and to look with their ears. And that tells them everything they need to know. As far as how we perpetuate our work with these causes, I feel doing things like this, of course, is super important, not just for what we’re talking about that others can hear, but also as a learning, an expansion, way of expanding for ourselves.
Because, for instance, Marc just mentioned this union thing in California in the late ’60s. And something, because my grandfather and my father were in the Black union in Boston. And I just looked it up and that didn’t merge until 1970, which really just blew my mind, because they talked about it and I thought just by listening to my dad talk that this was something that was way before my time.
I joined the union. I was the youngest person to join the union at 10 years old. So that was just five years after they [the segregated Black and white Boston musicians’ union chapters] merged. So these kinds of conversations are so important just for our own education. And for me, of course, you can formalize things if you’re working with an institution. But grassroots is always important. It’s always a big part of it. And it’s collective work. No one person or organization has a handle on it or does the most or everybody has to do something for something to actually shift.
But I think one of my strengths is just talking about what I believe in to other colleagues, male and female colleagues. Because when I talk to somebody, there’s really no way they can’t see what I see. I mean, it’s never happened. Of course, maybe people reject what I’m saying behind my back. But there’s many women that have really, how do I say, just bought, drank the Kool-Aid, bought into things that have been systemic. And we get used to how things are. So women have been not brainwashed, but just accepting of the idea that they shouldn’t talk about this. because they want to be considered equal. And so they don’t see gender. And I’m like, “No, gender is there. You can’t say you don’t see it. That’s like saying you don’t see race. It’s there whether you see it or not. It’s a problem whether you see it or not.”
And I think everybody has their passion. So if somebody doesn’t deal with this, they’re dealing with something else. That’s great. But as Marc said, intersectionality is so important because I can’t choose between race and gender as far as what’s important. So I’m looking at my brothers like they’re crazy at some point. If they’re talking about race and being an activist or an organizer in that regard, but haven’t given gender a second thought. And so I always see those connections. And sometimes that’s what I have to point out to people individually.
So I think we do what we can. And it’s a constant thing because once you open a Pandora’s box or once you see something, you can’t unsee it. So for me, it’s constant. It’s daily. I love being around people that I don’t have to talk about this with, you know, because it becomes tiring after a while. You can lose patience. I’ve been dealing with it my whole life and I maybe shut it out so I didn’t have to deal with it. And that’s a protective mechanism, too. But now that I have to deal with it, I really see the burden that we carry. So I try to explain that to people.
HM: Marc, let me ask you, do you see your responses from the audience when you go into activist-like repertoire, politically sensitive repertoire?
MR: Yes. To be honest with you, yes. People often, I think it’s very interesting in that most of what we’ve been talking about today has not been the content of the music. Like I’m singing an angry protest song. We’ve been talking about mostly organizing goes on behind the scenes. Who gets to be on the stage singing that angry protest song or whatever.
And like I’m all for singing angry protest song. I did a record called Songs of Resistance when Trump, during Trump’s first term. A record I’m proud of, but I will never make a multi-artist record again in my life. Please arrest me. I’ll serve the cause in other ways. To be honest with you, I think content of the songs is important, but not as important as it’s made out to be. Like a lot of artists who are like radical artists, they’re expressing radical sentiments as a way of seeking to sell records to a niche market of consumers who identify as radical. And there are worse sins than that. I’m glad people are putting out whatever message they’re putting out.
But I think a lot of the real organizing is not only what we say, but what we are. In other words, who gets a chance to be on that stage and who doesn’t? Who didn’t even have the money? Who gets into music when it becomes a marginal occupation where there isn’t the institutional framework or support? Who can afford to make music when your thing winds up on YouTube the next day? The thing you worked on for months or years is available for free? So the only thing you can get out of it is 0.038 pennies, a third of a penny per stream. It’s a starvation wage. Who can afford that?
So I think it’s what we are and how we fight that’s important. One way is to consider that conservatories have done a great job teaching young musicians. They all have entrepreneurship classes. They teach everybody, which entrepreneurship is how to take the received environment, how to use the received environment to your advantage. But what there’s almost no education about is collective action, how to change that environment, not just how to hustle within the environment we’re given, but how to change that environment. How through collective political action we can change laws, how through collective economic action we can create unions and create better conditions.
So I think that the conservatories need to get going on teaching collective action. Musicians, we have a history of collective action, and there’s larger movements, Black movement, women’s movement. There’s a history, and students need to know it, not just so they can be nice people, but to survive, because we are facing threats to our livelihoods on a scale of which we have never faced before. Generative AI can be legislated, it can be regulated, and there is a union negotiation coming up in January 2026 in which it can be stopped. But the union is not going to do anything about it unless we unite and make a lot of noise and demand that they do.
And so there’s several organizations that I am working with:
We’re going to make a lot of noise and we’re going to demand that the union go to bat, not only for jazz musicians, but for all independent musicians, negotiating for our interests in the AI envirnoment. Negotiating for our interests. How about some benefits for the people who play on the indie labels that the major labels distribute? Not only the in-house major label stuff. Right there, that takes in an awful lot of jazz.
And there’s other demands that they [the union] could be pushing that would help the people on our scene. We’re going to demand that they do it, and if they don’t, if they say they can’t do it or won’t do it, we’re going to say, stop claiming exclusive jurisdiction over our work and let us organize ourselves.
HM: Orbert, I’m going to end with you because being who you are is what really has stimulated the Chicago scene in ways. I want to point out you have a focus on immigrant communities in Chicago, and it seems like several of your concerts have focused on bringing out the connection between jazz and the music of various non-jazz societies. Do you want to talk a little bit about that to wrap things up?
OD: Absolutely. As Marc said earlier, we learned a lot from the first four years of the person who’s in office. And when the first immigrant ban went into effect we saw in a weekend, the destruction of what those words meant in having a band. I called my good friend Howard Levy, harmonica player, and we just chatted, a one-on-one conversation, asking “Wwhat can we do about this?”
We were actually about a month away from planning our next concert, and we decided to stop and just give focus on this. So the idea was to do three different concerts, three years in a row, based on three or four immigrant communities within Chicago.
And I am very, I don’t — that is to say I do my business with improvisation, so I had no master plan for this. But we started with Chinese Chicago musicians. I’m like, I don’t know any. So I searched Chinese musicians living in Chicago, and I came across a man named Kerry Leung who played multiple instruments and agreed to come to our office and talk.
His first thing was he got scared when he saw the word jazz. Says, “I don’t improvise.” So I said, okay, that’s no problem. Howard took out his harmonica, I took out my trumpet, and we just started playing. And before you knew it, man, Kerry was like all over it. And we said, welcome to the world of jazz.
Our next step was go to what we called our “innovation lab”. We got a rhythm section together, and we all played together. It was disastrous because we were playing and they were trying to play with us, and it’s a whole different language than they’re used to. So once we flipped the script, and said YOU play and let us compose to what you’re doing — then we created something totally new.
We started that process around October for about a month. And then by January, I would start composing by using every word that was spoken, every music that was played in the innovation lab, and creating these works for full orchestra. I’ll never do it again because I sacrificed three years of my life to do that.
But by now we’ve worked within the Chinese American community, the Indian — North and South India — with West African drumming. Oh, my goodness. With music of Bulgarian, Mexican American and Japanese communities in Chicago. We just did Brazil and Greece.
The thing that’s phenomenal is when we get together with the people of these communities as musicians, and have our conversations. That’s why we call it immigrant stories, Chicago immigrant stories. It’s the stories that matter. What does it mean to be American from your perspective?
Hopefully, this fall we’re going to start recording some of those pieces because after three concerts we’ve got a plethora of compositions and music. I’m going to call the results just “Immigrant Stories” instead of “Chicago Immigrant Stories.”
it may be something that gets blacklisted from the start. I hope it does, because then we’ll fight even harder to make it happen. That’s what it takes.
HM: Terri Lyne, do you have a last word?
TLC: No, really, just thank you for having this forum for us to come together and speak in solidarity. Thanks for doing that, Howard, and for supporting these causes because people want to act like politics is not really a part of the daily fabric of life or art, and it’s always that conversation about whether art or jazz has a responsibility or not.
I just don’t see how you avoid what’s happening around you socially, politically.And if we don’t all do something, even if it’s just being conscious… [nothing will change.] if I go back to gender, being conscious of what you support: I won’t mention the organization but I just saw an email this morning that bugged me because I’ll see long lists of groups and festivals, still to this day, the most famous jazz club in New York City — long lists of who’s coming — and there’s not one woman.
Politics and social activism is so important within our art form because it’s reflective of our community. And if we have a community, everyone needs to be represented and supported in that community.
So thank you for giving us this forum to speak.
HM: Thank you for participating. I’m very grateful to:
Terri Lynn Carrington from the Berkeley Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice,
Orbert Davis, Chicago Jazz Philharmonic,
Marc Ribot, an organizer and fantastic guitar player who’s working really for the ground level musicians.
Thanks all. See you again. In solidarity forever. And thank you for listening. You can check out episodes of The Buzz wherever you get your podcasts and we hope you will. Also visit us online at jjanews.org.
Twenty-five years ago the Jazz Journalists Association began to identify and celebrate activists, advocates, altruists, aiders and abettors of jazz as members of an “A Team,” soon renamed “Jazz Heroes.” Today the JJA announced its 2025 slate of these Heroes, 29 people across North America who put extraordinary efforts into sustaining and expanding jazz in its various forms.
So who are they? Musicians who double or triple as educators, presenters and support-group organizers. Festival producers from Tucson to Northampton, from the San Diego-Tijuana Borderland to Guelph, Ontario. The writer and scholar who founded Jazz Appreciation Month, the Jazz Foundation of America’s Executive Director and the woman whose persistence has paid off in greater opportunities and visibility for other women as players and stars. See them all JJAJazzAwards.org/2025-jazz-heroes.
This year’s Jazz Heroes include:
· Bobby Bradford, Los Angeles brassman who at age 90 continues to perform and lecture despite losing his home in the Altadena fires;
· Julián Plascencia, co-founder of the San Diego-Tijuana International Jazz Festival;
· John Edward Hasse, biographer of Duke Ellington, Wall Street Journal contributor, and Emeritus Curator of Music at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., where 30 years ago he initiated April across the globe as Jazz Appreciation Month;
· Joe Petrucelli of the Jazz Foundation of America, who’s partnered with the Mellon Foundation on the new Jazz Legacy Fellowships for lifetime achievements;
· Ellen Seeling, now based in the Bay Area, whose steadfast playing — she broke the Latin Jazz gender biases — and advocacy for women won establishment of blind auditions for the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, and ever more recognition that women can and do play jazz — well!
Trumpeters abound this year: Besides Bradford and Seeling, there’s Gregory Davis of the Dirty Dozens Brass Band, booker of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival contemporary jazz stage, and Mark Rapp, whose ColaJazz non-profit has amped up the scene in Columbia, South Carolina. But rhythm rules: Drummer-percussionist Jazz Heroes include Alan Jones of Seattle, Kenny Horst of Minneapolis-St. Paul, Clare Church (also a saxophonist, vocalist and partner in a Denver metro venue with her husband, Pete Lewis), David Rivera of San Juan, Puerto Rico and washboard enthusiast Jerry Gordon of New York’s Capital District.
Vocalists Karla Harris (Atlanta), Pamela Hart (Austin) and Kim Tucker (Philadelphia) do a lot more than simply — but beautifully — sing. Stephanie Matthews (Columbus, Ohio) has adapted STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) into STEAM — adding “A” for “Arts.” Brinae Ali of Baltimore turns tap-dancing into a multi-dimensional modern form. John Foster is invaluable to operations of the Jazz Institute of Chicago. Robert Radford has raised significant funds for Seattle jazz spheres. Amber Rogers and Daniel Bruce started a Cleveland jazz fest from scratch. And so on. The personality-profiles posted with portraits of each of the JJA’s 29 Jazz Heroes detail how they’ve distinguished themselves by leaning in to what jazz can do to inspire creativity, promote fellow-feeling and enhance life.
Others are:
· Sheila Anderson, the Hang Queen of WBGO-FM
· Ruth Griggs, Northampton Jazz Festival
· Ajay Heble, International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation
· Khris Dodge, Tucson Jazz Festival
· Ralphe Armstrong, Detroit-boosting bassist
· Wes Lowe, beloved West Palm Beach jazz teacher)
The JJA — an independent nonprofit with 250 international members, currently — believes Jazz Heroes are essential to the health of the overall jazz ecosystem, and supports local efforts to celebrate them. The organization — an independent non-profit promoting the interests of writers, photographers, broadcaster and other media workers covering jazz — will produce an online Heroes event, April 17th, and local presentations of Jazz Hero certificates. Details aren’t set yet, but will be found soon at JJAJazzAwards and JJANews.
Every music genre — indeed, every art form — survives due to the efforts of people like these Heroes, working behind the scenes, often for little financial reward, because they love what they do for the art they advance. Just like the artists themselves.
Six-hundred pages of profiles, portraits, interviews, reviews, inquiries and analysis of music, all from the past 20 years by dozens of the people far and wide who make it their business to cover jazz in its multifarious, ever-permutating forms. Created by a team comprising editor David Adler, photo editor Patrick Hinely, copy chief Terri Hinte, me as editorial consultant and readers Fiona Ross and Martin Johnson,, with a dazzling cover photo by Lauren Deutsch (of Roscoe Mitchell, from her “Tangible Sound” series), and dedicated to the memory of JJA emeritus member Dan Morgenstern (1929-2024) The Jazz Omnibus strikes me — involvement admitted! — as unique and multi-dimensional.
It doesn’t claim to be a comprehensive history yet it provides a sweeping overview of the topics addressed by music journalists, with many different perspectives conveyed in words and pictures. It offer newcomers numerous entry points, introductions to emerging artists as well as in-depth discussions of icons. Connoisseurs will find plenty to argue about as well as some work they’ve probably never come across before.
What’s great about this anthology is the diversity of voices and viewpoints focused on the incredibly resilient creative expression we call jazz (acknowledging that some practitioners reject the term). There is been nothing quite like it in the jazz literature — most anthologies represent a single writer or photographer’s pieces. Here we’ve got Ted Panken, Paul de Barros, Suzanne Lorge, Nate Chinen, Ted Gioia, Willard Jenkins, Enid Farber, Bob Blumenthal, Bill Milkowski, James Hale, Larry Blumenfeld, Jordannah Elizabeth, Ashley Kahn, Luciano Rossetti — observers immersed in their subjects. DownBeat’s The Great Jazz Interviews is similarly valuable, as is The Oxford Companion to Jazz(I’m in that 2004 anthology, writing about jazz to and from Africa), but I daresay The Jazz Omnibus is more freewheeling and multi-faceted.
In its early gestation I thought of it as a descendent of two volumes I’d loved as a child: This is My Best and This is My Best Humor (now completely disappeared) both edited by Whit Burnett, founder of Story magazine (founded in 1931, ongoing). There’s also been Da Capo’s Best Music Writing series, but it was far from jazz-centrric and ended 13 years ago. Jazzmen, regarded as first jazz history book published in the U.S. (in 1939), also featured chapters contributed by nine writers. It’s gratifying to have The Jazz Omnibus join such a literary lineage.
The Omnibus is, of course, central to the mission of the JJA — which you may well not know, is a New York-registered non-profit of some 250 internationally-based writers, photographers, broadcasters and new media professionals, networking to sustain ourselves as independent disseminators of news and views of jazz (as on our website JJANews). I’ve been president since 1994. We incorporated in 2004. Even before then, we’d established annual Jazz Awards for altruistic and journalistic as well as musical accomplishments; these continue. We’re media-forward, running monthly “Seeing Jazz” photographers’ sessions archived on YouTube, producing the podcast The Buzz, having experimented
In the early 1990s, when my friend and colleague Art Lange was JJA president, the organization produced two collections of members’ writings, mimeographed, Xeroxed and stapled, a la fanzines. These were just meant for us, the members. The Jazz Omnibus doesn’t claim to represent the totality of jazz, but it’s intended to be broadly accessible and appealing, Meant for everyone. As is “jazz.”
End of shameless self-promotion — for now. You got this far: Please see The Jazz Omnibus!
Since 2001, the Jazz Journalists Association (over which I preside) has celebrated some 350 “activists, advocates, altruists, aiders and abettors of jazz,” as Jazz Heroes.The class of 2024 Jazz Heroes has just been announced, recognizing the good works of 33 people whose efforts extend from the Baja-San Diego borderland to Ottawa, Canada, through 27 U.S cities, from Akron to Tucson, rural Montana to
photo collage thanks to Melanie Nañez
the South Carolina Lowcountry, New York’s Capital Region as well as Brooklyn and Harlem, Newark, Chicago, the Bay Area, LA, NOLA, DC, Austin, Denver, Boston, Detroit, Indianapolis, Charlotte, Brattleboro, Hilton Head Island, Portland, Seattle — where there’s music, there’s jazz (and given more organizational resources, the JJA could celebrate 33 more . . .)
Jazz Heroes do the background work, sometimes acknowledged but seldom fairly compensated, that sustains as a vital cultural entity the past and present of an art form that reflects better than any other (I’ll argue) what people not much driven by commercial concerns do to keep themselves and their communities humming. Most serious jazz fans understand their connections to this music as more than a hobby, perhaps as much as a calling. It might be considered a lifestyle, or even a way of life.
Why these folks and and others (like me) love jazz more than (if not always instead of or to the exclusion of) other genres of music is a question for speculation, to what ends I’m not sure. I grew up on Chicago’s south side in the ‘50s, jazz was in the air but so was Sinatra, Elvis, show tunes, r&b, popular classical works, Lawrence Welk, tv and ad ditties, quasi-Jewish music and movie soundtracks. I’m temperamentally partial to narrative drama, heightened emotions, saturated colors, sudden (spontaneous? unpredictable?) action, an ethos that values imaginative engagement, emotional range and a whatever’s-necessary work ethic. Demographics + personal preferences = personal esthetics. Call that news? Seems tautological.
But what’s cool, maybe deserving of note, and demonstrated clearly by the JJA’s Jazz Heroes campaign is that this music, for many years reportedly representing a tiny and diminishing percentage of record sale and concert returns, holds sway beyond such metrics. Jazz may be deemed elitist or crass, the most elevated form of spontaneous creation or sheer noise, but it’s here, everywhere, ineradicable. Its proponents are working across many sectors of the arts world, from artist to audience, patron to promoter to presenter. Think too of the references to jazz — the sound, the iconography, the immortals — that pops up in advertising. See what jazz is used to sell, then consider how jazz-the-music may not be selling, but jazz-the-idea is.
[Yet — maybe that’s not quite true. André 3000 playing processed wood flutes is fine by me.
And in the last week thanks to Ashley Kahn’s DownBeat Blindfold Test of Cecile McLorin Salvant, I learned of Laufey. ‘“She’s the most famous jazz singer today,” said the most radically gifted jazz singer
to emerge in the past 15 years (talk about this elsewhere). I get it. Doesn’t everyone dig bossa nova? Isn’t kind of brave of this Icelandic-Chinese woman who turns 25 on April 23 to play guitar and piano and sing solo front a string ensemble, drawing uninitiated listeners into the pleasures of soft swing. To the the extent that she’s successful, maybe it’s heroic? Or is Laufey just codger-bait?]
Stardom is not requisite for JJA Jazz Heroes. Some have been brushed with fame: Marla Gibbs, for instance, who turned her earnings from high visibility tv roles into support of the Black arts and music movement of Los Angeles; Ahmed Abdullah, trumpeter traveling the spaceways with Sun Ra for decades, and co-directing the Brooklyn cultural center Sista’s Place; Charlton Singleton and Quentin Baxter of Grammy-winning Ranky Tanky, preserving by updating the Gullah traditions of the South Carolina Lowcountry. But others shine in relative isolation: Pianist Ann Tappan, who teaches from her home in Manhattan, Montana, a town of 2000, outside Bozeman; David Leander Williams, who became historian of Indianapolis’ Indiana Avenue, since no one else had; Arthur Vint, who’s established a cool club in Tucson, having learned how laboring in that temple of jazz, NYC’s Village Vanguard; trumpeter-composer-bandleader Iván Trujillo, who crosses the Mexico-U.S. border and jazz sub-genre lines, too, bringing traditional New Orleans jazz, free improvisation, electro-acoustic and classical music to binational Baja California-San Diego, recording with young players remotely during the pandemic.
I’m proud the JJA shines light on everyday heroes, who make the world go ‘round.
The Jazz Journalists Association announces the 2023 Jazz Heroes — “activists, advocates, altruists, aiders and abettors of jazz,” formerly the A Team — emphasizing as it has annually since 2001 that jazz
is culture that comes from the ground up, by individuals crossing all demographic categories, working frequently with others and beyond basic job definitions or profit motives to sustain and spread the vital music born in America. This year the JJA (a non-profit professional organization for journalists covering jazz) is honoring 36 such Heroes in 32 US cities. If we had the capacity, we could do twice that number. Indeed, here’s the Honor Roll of all “A Team” members and Jazz Heroes since the initiative began.
Personality profiles and portraits of each Hero, written by members of their communities, are posted at JJAJazzAwards.org. Besides being hailed online, which the JJA hopes will interest local media in advancing the human interest elements of stories about neighbors putting themselves out for the sake of creative music, Heroes receive engraved statuettes at events in their localities during the summer.
The Heroes, by city:
Albuquerque –Mark Weber, radio-show host, writer-photographer, record producer
Atlanta – Dr. Gordon Vernick, trumpeter and educator at George State University
San Juan – Ramon Vázquez, bassist and community organizer
San Jose – Brendan Rawson, Executive Director San Jose Jazz, producer of Ukraine exchange project
Sarasota –Ed Linehan, Sarasota Jazz Club president
Seattle – Eugenie Jones, singer-songwriter, Music for a Cause
Stanford – Fredrick J. Berry, trumpeter-educator, College of San Mateo + Stanford Jazz Orchestra
Washington, D.C. – Charlie Young III, coordinator Instrumental Jazz Studies, Howard Univ.
Wilmington NC – Sandy Evans, North Carolina Jazz Festival, Jazz Lovers newsletter
More information about the campaign, part of the JJA’s programs aligning with Jazz Appreciation Month and International Jazz Day, is reported at JJANews.org. One exciting tidbit is that the JJA’s 2023 Jazz Heroes were announced on April 6 — 100 years to the day after King Joe Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band with Louis Armstrong recorded an early high of jazz development, the classic “Dipper Mouth Blues.”
I’m inordinately proud of the new JJANews website because it makes easily accessible the videos, podcasts, articles with photos and online-realtime activities of the Jazz Journalists Association, such as lthe March 26 public Book Bash! with authors, editors and publishers, being held on on our unique virtual
reality SyncSpace.live site — plus background/office assets, in a clear, functional way. Kudos to designer Melanie Nañez. You have to visit the site yourself to see what it really has to offer.
My gratification extends, though, to the range of activities this small although international professional membership organization has initiated to keep jazz media in public discussion. In the past year JJA members have launched a podcastThe Buzz, taking on issues like “White Critic/Black Music” — and Seeing Jazz Photography Master classes, such as one being held Saturday March 26 with Award winning Carol Friedman discussing her selected images, live and interactive, the hour-long program later archived at our YouTube channel. It’s held three innovative events at SyncSpace — which allows attendees to have private, personal encounters as well as participate in panels, presentations, live music events and a Screening room full of jazz videos seen no where else.
The JJA has published articles from correspondents in Havana, Vienna, Romania, Bergamo and elsewhere. Its 220-some members post news of their latest accomplishments month, and individually are addressing jazz in all its forms, in every available media, pushing into new areas same as jazz musicians restlessly expand the bounds of what’s been considered acceptable in music. Jazz journalists, mostly freelancers, have to be deft, quick, adaptable in the fast-changing media marketplace. And we should not be limited as writers OR broadcasters OR photographers OR videographers, because most of us have learned to do whatever we can to advance our messages about the joys and relevance of music.
Armstrong Park — Entrance to the JJA’s SyncSpace.live venue
So big websites such as JJANews, with its portals to diverse departments themselves rich in content, surely seem like good models for going forward. Sites that feature cross-platform multi-media are sure to outlast those trying to refresh conventions of print newspapers and magazines. True, the JJA as a membership-driven professional organization does not have a viable business model — there’s no advertising to sell, few grants to apply for, and its generous sponsors (currently the Joyce and George Wein Foundation, Arkadia Records, the Jazz Foundation of America) are highly prized. But still — this is the way. Look and listen back to history, for guidance as well as pleasure. True direction is forward ho.
Roscoe Mitchell — internationally renown composer, improviser, ensemble leader, winds and reeds virtuoso who has pioneered the use of “little instruments” and dramatic shifts of sonic scale in the course of becoming a “supermusician . . .someone who moves freely in music, but, of course, with a well established background behind . . .”* reveals his equal freedom in another medium in his first exhibition,
“Keeper of the Code: Paintings 1963 -2022,” which opened Jan 20 (closing March 23) at the Chicago gallery Corbett vs. Dempsey.
A crowd of avant-gardists was in attendance at a dry but nonetheless spirited two-hour reception, impressed by the vibrancy of Mitchell’s nearly three dozen works, mostly on canvas, ranging in size from 4″ x 4″ to 4′ x 4′. Present and past members of the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the collective Mitchell helped establish with Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton, Amina Claudine Myers, Wadada Leo Smith, Henry Threadgill and others in mid ’60s) where there, such as Mwata Bowden, Junius Paul, Mike Reed (of Constellation, the Hungry Brain, Pitchfork, the Chicago Jazz Festival programming committee), Tomeka Reid and Kahil El Zabar — along with colleagues Angel Bat Dawid (clarinetist/pianist/vocalist of International Anthem’s The Oracle), cornetist Josh Berman, pianist-synthesist Jim Baker and drummer Michael Zerang.
photographer Lauren Deutsch (also former executive director of the Jazz Institute of Chicago) as well as gallerists John Corbett (a prolific author, School of the Art Institute of Chicago professor, past Berlin Jazz Fest artistic director) and Jim Dempsey (formerly of SAIC and the Gene Siskel Film Center), stood listening raptly to Mitchell, amid tables and racks of gongs, hand percussion and horns, poerform with his Sound Ensemble — multi-instrumentalist Scott Robinson and baritone Thomas Buckner — and flutist extraordinaire Robert Dick as a guest.
The music — freely improvised — was hushed, suspenseful, most attentive to timbres, tensions, contrasts, comparisons and interactions of sounds (Soundis the title of Roscoe Mitchell’s groundbreaking debut recording). It was not melodically or rhythmically driven, but haunting in its passage.
As mentioned on its website, “Creative music has always been a feature of the gallery’s activities. In addition to having its own record label, CvsD is proud to represent Peter Brötzmann and the estate of Sun Ra.” Multidisciplinary and cross-displinary aspects of ‘creative music’ are, of course, principles that date to “Ellington, Armstrong, Matisse and Joyce” (cf. Jazz Modernism, by late Northwestern University professor Alfred Appel Jr.).
Upon retiring in 2016 from his position as Darius Milhaud Chair of Composition at Mills College in Oakland, CA and returning to his Wisconsin home, where he had pandemic down-time, Mitchell picked up his brushes agin. The majority of the Corbett v. Dempsey show come from these extremely productive
past six years of practice, depicted in the gallery’s installation of several videos shot by Wendy Nelson, Mitchell’s wife.
Self-taught regarding visual art — though he says he’s looked at “everyone,” Mitchell’s current style demonstrates extraordinary concentration for detail, a fecund imagination, surprising juxtapositions of colors and geometric elements, connections to or suggestions of African art, masks, Chicago’s Hairy Who and COBRA groups, local street portraitist Lee Godie, Van Gogh and even Ivan Albright. There’s a playfulness, demonstrated for instance by several works that make sense any direction they’re hung. African-American themes that emerged from CvD’s recent Emilio Cruz exhibit and the Bob Thompson retrospective at University of Chicago’s Smart Museum (at which Corbett spoke) contextualize Mitchell’s painting, too.
It has not been unusual that AACM musicians or other exploratory instrumentalists have painted: Muhal, Wadada and Braxton all represented themselves visually, as has Ornette Coleman, Marion Brown, Miles Davis, Oliver Lake and oh yes, Pee Wee Russell. But the dry, incisive humor (several paintings can be hung any-side-up), habit of defining parameters then stress-testing them, commitment to and follow-through on unusual ideas, re-sizing of details and main themes, seems uniquely characteristic of this artist, this individual: Roscoe Mitchell.
*”I believe that the super musician…this is what I would like to be, you know. The super musician, as close as I can figure it out, is someone that moves freely in music. But, of course, that’s with a well established background behind you. The way I see it is everything is evolving. . . . So, the super musician has a big task in front of them because they have to know something about all the music that went down because we are approaching this age of spontaneous composition. And that’s what it is. Really good improvisation is spontaneous composition. The thing that you have to do is get yourself to the level where you can do it spontaneously. If you are sitting at home composing, you’ve got time. You can say, ‘Oh, maybe I’ll try it this way, or maybe I’ll try it that way.’ But you want to get yourself to the point to where you can make these decisions spontaneously.” — Roscoe Mitchell, “In Search of the Super Musician” by Jack Gold-Molina, January 8, 2004, AllAboutJazz.com.
Lest we forget: In 1922 Louis Armstrong arrived in Chicago from New Orleans, with his wife Lil Hardin,
Louis Armstrong, Lil Hardin Armstrong/Frank Driggs Collection
mentor King Joe Oliver and colleagues such as the Brothers Dodd (clarinetist Jimmy, drummer Baby) kick-starting jazz into the most spontaneous, joyful, virtuosic, collaborative art form the U.S. has yet produced. The Jazz Institute of Chicago celebrated this anniversary throughout 2022 — here are four brief articles Kent Richmond and I co-wrote for the JIC JazzGram, telling the story with playlist embedded.
Herb Deutsch (glasses) with Robert Moog and his synthesizer
In February, I saluted Herb Deutsch, co-inventor of the Moog synthesizer, on his 90th birthday. Deutsch died on December 9, with synthesizers ever more present in music creation of all sorts, and a notable if slow trend towards electro-acoustic improvising ensembles, which he pioneered. Is the trend taking hold? Or a thing mostly of the past?
As I wrote in February:
[Deutsch’s] recordings collected on From Moog to Mac sort of a best-of, with “Jazz Images, a Worksong and Blues,” (1965 — credited as the first composition for a Moog) featuring bluesy piano and (overdubbed?) horn intersected interwoven with thick and thin electronic lines, unnaturally long fades, whirling sirens, white noise, delays and maybe backward tape. A Christmas Carol (1963) his prescient mix of found sounds, spoken word and haunting ambiance, was a contemporaneous response to the Alabama church bombing that killed four young girls and also drew profound comment from James Baldwin, John Coltrane and Dr. Martin Luther King. Deutsch’s composition still has power . . .
To celebrate that aspect of Deutsch’s work, here’s a view-list of mixed acoustic instruments and electronics, old and new, analog or digital, in-studio or live.
I’m bouncing around in the back seat of a pal’s car with a couple other high school wannabes, cruising through our leafy-green, cushy but staid Chicago suburb, when the most amazing music comes roaring out of the dashboard radio. We’re not going fast – have no urgent destination — but the music shakes us up. We’ve never heard anything like it before. Few have. It’s early summer 1967.
A crude,
siren-like, octave-leaping guitar lick – whomp, whamp! whomp, whamp! —
grabs us, leading to a slinky, fuzz-toned phrase and a bunch of rhythm chords
that crunch all the notes into a spiky fistful. Then a young man, dazed and
confused, yelps in an echo chamber.
“Purple
haze, all in my brain/Lately things don’t seem the same. . . Acting funny, and
I don’t know why/’cuse me, while I kiss the sky.” It may not be lyric
poetry, but as a compressed description of an ecstatic moment, it’s hard to
beat. And the singer’s next utterance, “Am I happy, or in misery?” —
slamming drums and electric bass suddenly silent, leaving him wailing, all
alone — “Whatever it is, that girl put a spell on me,” crystallizes
a state of mind us guys can relate to.
We roll on, grinning hard while this guy cries, “Help me, help me, oh no, no, no . . .” A reverberant wind howls. His voice comes as if from a hovering cloud, expelling harsh breaths. The guitar strikes out with an intricate melody, slips back into its opening riff. He sings: “Is it tomorrow, or just the end of time?” There’s no answer, no possible answer, to that question, just the guitar ringing on and on, worrying one high pitch that seems to be draped in metal chains or coins, something clinking crazily along with it, and a chant underneath, “Purple haze, purple haze” – as the song, still raging with intensity, fades out.
“That
was Jimi Hendrix, playing ‘Purple Haze,’ a new hit from his album Are You Experienced,” the cheery
disc jockey leaps in. He’s on a commercial station that promotes itself to
teens with the latest releases by British and American bands, Motown, Aretha
Franklin and soulmen like Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Sam and Dave. Does he
know or care the past two minutes and 50 seconds change my musical life? And
not just mine, or my friends’, but the lives of our entire generation?
He’d
introduced us to a true musical genius whose recordings and performances will
never be forgottenand perhaps never surpassed: Jimi Hendrix, the improbable
American, an unlikely hero, a genuinely freaky original, a blazing star.
You can read the comprehensive bio of James Marshall “Jimi” Hendrix, who died on September 18, 1970, elsewhere. I can tell you how he sounded to a high school senior and college freshman while he was alive, because I saw him in concert three times during the brief flash of his career. I heard him in Chicago where his opening band was the original grunge trio version of Soft Machine; in Syracuse, where Hendrix was at the height of his powers, and in New York City, a show I don’t remember, which to some of my age group proves that I was there.
But first: “Purple Haze” – what did it mean? Me and my buddies had to know, because the sound was so compelling, enlivening, uproarious and such fun we all had to hear it again, and more of the same if such music was possibly available. Purple Haze was a glorious, hilarious mystery. Was it about drugs? An expression of chaos from inside a messed-up mind? But if the singer – Jimi Hendrix? what kind of name was that? – was so messed up, how could he play such stunning guitar? Or: Was it possible to play such stunning guitar without being messed up? We had to hear it again, right away.
My memory can’t be exactly right, that we end up at another friends’ house who just happened to have already bought the album. Are You Experienced by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, reads the hand-drawn letters on the cover, in purple against a mustard-colored background, surrounding a round photo taken with a fish-eye lens of three dudes with bushy hair, washed out color-wise except for yellow highlights on their Carnaby Street clothes. The guy in the middle has a Fu Manchu mustache and dark skin. The black and white back cover photo suggests he has acne on his cheeks. He’s got a heavy gaze, slightly opened thick lips, a broad nose, busy eyebrows, an ascot knotted around his throat. This is Jimi Hendrix?
Yes, the world was about to find out. Briefly: Jimi Hendrix was 25 years old, a high school dropout who joined the paratroopers instead of serving two years in prison for riding in stolen cars but had managed to get himself discharged early as a generally bad soldier. He’s grown up in Seattle, the far -northwest US port city and freight hub, poor but in racially integrated circumstances. He was a self-taught guitarist who’d grown up listening to his father’s Muddy Waters and B.B. King records, learned showy guitar moves by watching an older acquaintance, started gigging professionally but irresponsibly while a teenager, and had kicked around since 1962 in the lower echelons of the rhythm and blues circuit.
Hendrix, sometimes calling himself Jimmy James, had worked his way up as a guitarist from playing the TOBA (Theater Owners’ Booking Association, also called “tough on black asses”) southern “chitlin circuit” of venues meant to draw black audiences. He’d played guitar for the Isley Brothers, Curtis Knight, Little Richard and King Curtis. He’d made it to New York City, where Keith Richard’s girlfriend had heard his band The Blue Flame at the Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village. She liked Jimi and introduced him to rock ‘n’ roll impresarios including Chas Chandler, bassist in the gritty British group the Animals, who was intent on becoming a manager and producer.
Chandler took Hendrix to London, where he flourished in association with newborn guitar gods Pete Townsend and Eric Clapton. Hendrix built up his stage chops, contacts and charisma by playing Paris in a show headlined by Johnny Hallyday, jamming with Cream, meeting the Beatles. In June 1967 “Purple Haze” was issued in the US; Are You Experienced had been out in the UK since May. The Beatles’ masterpiece Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released on June 1 that year. In Chicago’s upscale suburbs, we kids were into that, too.
Chicago’s own music, as I knew it then, was exciting even without imports. Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Rice “Sonny Boy Williamson” Miller and many of the other bluesmen and women who had electrified repertoire that came out of the black American south were still playing in the neighborhoods. A generation of their younger sidemen – Junior Wells, Buddy Guy, Otis Rush, Son Seals – were on the rise, as were white kids like harmonica playing Paul Butterfield and guitarist Mike Bloomfield who had learned from their idols’ records and club performances. By 1967 avant-garde keyboardist Sun Ra had left the city, but the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) had established itself with composer/improvisers Muhal Richard Abrams, Fred Anderson, Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Braxton, Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, Amina Claudine Myers, Leroy Jenkins, Wadada Leo Smith, Lester Bowie, Henry Threadgill and about three dozen others experimenting in large and small ensemble formats.
There was rock ‘n’ roll, too: bouffant-haired Wayne Cochran and his rhythm and blues backing band the C.C. Riders had a long engagement at a downtown venue. The local Shadows of Night scored such a hit with the song “Gloria” that few of us realized it was a cover version, because we never heard the Van Morrison original. A group called The Flock with electric violinist Jerry Goodman (who eventually joined John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra) was popular, headlining at the Kinetic Playground, a hall patterned after Manhattan’s Electric Circus which had pulsing light shows, no seating so everyone wandered around, and an admission policy that allowed even teenagers under legal drinking age (like me) to hear the Jefferson Airplane, Vanilla Fudge, Iron Butterfly and other touring psychedelic groups.
In the 12
months between summer 1967 and ‘ 68, my friends and I mixed music with
politics, because we had to. The Viet Nam war was going full tilt, we guys were
all afraid we’d be drafted and we marched against it. The Civil Rights struggle
was still in process, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, urban riots
erupted across the country, we read about and thought about and talked about
what changes in race relations had to come about. We all loved black music —
blues, jazz and soul. Not only music made by black people, of course.
After one
major protest rally a bunch of us went to hear the Mothers of Invention and
Cream at the Chicago Coliseum. But those bands were informed by black people’s
music, too. I was at the movies watching the Marx Brothers when the whisper ran
through the audience that President Lyndon Johnson, the vice president who had
become president when John F. Kennedy was shot dead, had announced he would not
run for re-election. At a Doors concert Jim Morrison urged ticket holders in
the balcony to throw their folding chairs down to the main floor as an act of
rage. I was on the main floor, and didn’t want to be hit by a folding chair, so
that seemed like a bad idea. Fortunately, not many people up above thought it
was smart, either.
Hendrix
never incited anyone to such violence, symbolic or otherwise, and other than
giving voice to “peace and love” was seldom overtly political.
Everyone knew where he stood – we all stood together then — and his music was
clearly about some sort of transcendence. Throughout Are You Experienced he sang mostly about extreme states of mind.
Song titles
included “Manic Depression,” “Love or Confusion” and
“I Don’t Live Today.” “Foxey Lady” and “Fire”
(“Girl, let me stand next to your fire”) were about intense lust,
though Jimi had an enviably cool approach to letting his objects of desire know
of his need. “The Wind Cries Mary” seemed to be about devastating
loss. “Hey Joe,” his breakthrough single in England, was about a man
driven by jealousy to murder. Only “Third Stone From The Sun” was a
relief from all this. It was the spaciest track of all, a serenade for stoners
with a few words distorted unto incomprehensibility and quavery guitar that
opened once for a pure rock chorus, later for a wild episode of slide, delay
and feedback.
The
feelings Jimi evoked were much more tangible than the subjects that seemed to
stimulate them. Maybe that’s one reason I took myself to his show at Chicago’s
Auditorium Theatre on August 10, 1968, just three weeks before I left my
parents home to enter Syracuse University.
I was in a restless mood in those days, questioning everything, sure of nothing, open to experience but also a little afraid. I’d recently heard Dr. John the Night Tripper on a bill with Linda Rondstat, going with my pal Charlie, a drummer with whom I jammed. Why didn’t he go to hear Hendrix with me? Maybe he was broke. I didn’t have much money, myself, just enough to buy the the cheapest ticket, which took me to the highest row in the ornate architectural masterpiece that had been recently restored. Before the music started I gazed on murals idealizing local history, including the expulsion of Indians tribes that had lived here. Once The Soft Machine began, I concentrated on the music. But I didn’t like what I heard.
Drummer
Robert Wyatt, bassist Kevin Ayers and organist Mike Ratledge offered what I
recall as grunting, clunky, intermittent burst of sounds that didn’t add up to
songs at all. If they intended this to be avant garde jazz, they had nothing on
the AACM members I’d been listening to, who developed intricate if often long
and oblique pieces that highlighted ferocious virtuosity rather than ugly
noise. I sat through the opening set, impatient.
When Jimi, bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell came onstage, it was instantly a different story. According to a website (http://home.earthlink.net/~ldouglasbell/dir1/tapelis2.htm) that documents Hendrix’s set lists, the Experience opened up with “Are You Experienced?,” went into “I Don’t Live Today” and then “Fire” – then and now one of my favorites for its bouncy bass line, relentless pace, lewd lyrics, Jimi’s bold vocals and piercing guitar breaks. From where I sat it felt like I was looking straight down on the band, and whereas the three members of Soft Machine had seemed to play disjointedly, each from his own space, Hendrix’s trio was a unit, bassist and drummer raptly attentive to their leader.
Who
wouldn’t be? Hendrix was flamboyantly dressed, and moved fluidly. He was
utterly at ease, seldom looking at the guitar he played left-handed,
occasionally glancing back at Redding and Mitchell but mostly beaming straight
out to the crowd. I assume people in the good seats where bopping with him,
captured as I was. Here was a lanky, Afro-topped proponent of a new cultural
tribe, who made headbands, paisley shirts with foppish cuffs, beaded bellbottom
pants, brocaded vests, leather fringed jackets and furred or feathered hats
look natural, not ridiculous. He played sawtoothed legato lines on straight
blues like “Red House,” had fun with all the cute little
heartbreakers and sweet little love-makers he sang about in “Foxey
Lady,” following up with the dynamite Purple Haze,” ending his set –
all too soon for my taste, I wanted more — making fun of himself and all other
rock stars and their groupies with a sarcastic version of “Wild Thing.”
Years later
I’d watch Jimi on film tear up that dumb tune (written by the brother of actor
Jon Voight) during his introductory and breakthrough performance at the 1967
Monterey Pop Festival. In Monterey Pop, the
film of the historic 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, Hendrix pretends to chew gum
while uttering the idiotic mumblings in that tune of a teenager struck by a
crush: “Wild thing, I think you move me/But I want to know for sure . . .
” At Monterey he ended by squirting lighter fluid onto the red Fender
Stratocaster he’d painted himself with vines and love hearts, setting it afire
and smashing it against the floor until its body split from its neck. I doubt
he was as inspired at the Auditorium as he’d been a year before, establishing
his new persona before the royalty of rock (Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones
had introduced him) in the first ever three-day convention of youth-oriented
bands. He didn’t burn his Strat the night I heard him, but did mangle it beyond
use, swinging it like a bat against his stack of Marshall amps. Was it love, or
was it confusion? I couldn’t guess, but left the Auditorium exhilarated, free
for a while at least of worry about life changes I was facing. Hell, Jimi
Hendrix played his funky stuff without a stitch of reserve, sang tenderly but
also with his tongue-in-cheek and destroyed equipment like there was no gig
tomorrow. What was it I was so concerned about?
Actually,
college was kicks. Oh, I was homesick, couldn’t drag myself to a 9 a.m.
calculus class and didn’t understand what I was doing in school. But there were
parties nearly every night in my dorm, lots of funny, smart people to meet and,
of course, rock concerts to help us get past the academics. At the War
Memorial, a big multi-use convention center like every medium-sized American
city has, I heard Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company (who
couldn’t play in tune), Steppenwolf (using taped motorcycle sounds in their hit
“Born To Be Wild”) and Sly and the Family Stone (super tight, and Sly
came out from behind his organ to do a high-stepping dance). In May 1969, like
an award for getting through my first year, the Jimi Hendrix Experience came to
town.
About 5500
people attended the 7:30 pm show. Tickets cost $4, $5 and $6. Cat Mother and
the All Night Newsboys, a surprisingly sophisticated group I didn’t know much
about – though Hendrix had produced their debut record — opened up, playing
well. The Experience came on and played better.
Between the
show I’d seen nine months earlier and now, Hendrix had become bigger than life.
Axis: Bold As Love, the second
Experience album, had been released the year before. It was another winner in
my opinion, though it began with a silly sketch in which Jimi portrayed an
alien being interviewed on the radio, which climaxed with some fancy stereo
channel panning. That ended quickly, so the first song could set a tone of
quizzical and lyrical science fiction. “Up From the Skies” launched
its theme of quizzical, lyrical science fiction with exquisite rock/pop/rhythm
& blues music: Hendrix’s spongy wah-wah guitar underlining his assertion
that he’d come without malice in mind.
“I
just want to talk to you,” Jimi sang; to overcome resistance, he urged
listeners to “Let your fancy flow.” In the bridge he noted the world
had changed, and not for the better, since an earlier visit “in years gone
by. . . That’s why I’m so concerned.” As a traveler from outer, he had
great curiosity: “I want to hear and see everything,” he repeated,
quite believably. And his guitar playing was just perfect, though he took pains
to downplay it. “Aw, shucks” he muttered after an extraordinary
passage toward the end of his second solo. “If my daddy could see me
now!”
In track after track – “Spanish Castle
Magic,” “Wait Until Tomorrow,” “Ain’t No Telling,”
“Little Wing,” “If 6 Was 9,” “You Got Me
Floating” and “She’s So Fine,” Hendrix, Redding, Mitchell, their
manager Chas Chandler and their creatively contributive studio engineer Eddie
Kramer crafted songs that remain able to inspire awe, delight, grins, passion
and even an occasional idea. Jimi spoke-sung some lyrics, crooned others, and
delivered so much personality that 38 minutes of music required multiple
listenings for true comprehension. Melodies, rhythms, vocal blends, echoes,
slashes, zigs and zags that skimmed the surface of the songs then dipped in and
out of them like dolphins . . . Axis has many levels of sonic
information, all worth exploring.
Hendrix, Chandler and Kramer devised these pieces originally for radio play – all but one were at or under the three-minute length, the longest duration commercial radio would at that time accept. With their multi-track tricks, the compositions were difficult even for someone with Hendrix’s mastery of live performance techniques, to bring to the concert stage. But at the Syracuse War Memorial, the Experience demonstrated the breadth and depth of what they could do.
According
to Jym Fahey’s liner notes for the 2010 reissue of Axis, “only ‘Spanish Castle Magic’ and sometimes ‘Little Wing’
were ever regularly performed by the group.” According to the French
online Forum Jimi Hendrix (http://jimihendrix.forumactif.net,
the set list for Syracuse comprised “Spanish Castle Magic,” songs
from Are You Experienced?, the
transformed traditional blues “Red House” and “Voodoo Child
(Slight Return)” from Electric
Ladyland. (Oh, I didn’t mention that Electric
Ladyland was released in fall of 1968? Just around the same time as The White Album by the Beatles and Beggars Banquet by the Stones? That I
used to skip classes for a whole day to listen to these albums at full blast,
high as a kite in my dorm room? And that all the longhairs did that then?)Well,
I remember distinctly Hendrix at the War Memorial doing “If 6 Were
9,” with its dramatic recitative: “White collar conservative flashing
down the street/pointing that plastic finger at me/They’re hoping soon my kind
will drop and die/But I’m going to wear my freak flag high, high!”
For once
Hendrix posed himself directly as anti-conservative. Yeah, I knew that. What I
hadn’t realized up to that point was that Hendrix could actually sing and play
a complex guitar part simultaneously. Not as B.B. King did, in call and
response; not as Eric Clapton did, also alternating singing and playing. As
Jimi Hendrix did, able to pat his head and rub his belly, sing and play, juggle
and whistle, smirk and be serious, trip out and remain collected, all at once.
Or so I surmised.
I can see
Hendrix onstage in Syracuse still, a man of enormous talent, artistic as well
as entertainment distinction, obviously a gypsy and a sensualist, probably a
rascal, possibly a narcissist – but evidently not out of control. He commanded
my ultra snobbish musical interest, he fascinated me as a cultural radical with
an enormous popular following and he was just damn fun to listen to.But
the late ’60s and early ’70s were treacherous times years in which the peak achievements of my
generation’s pop music heroes were created, and years also in which they all
fell down. The failings of the counter-culture seemed sudden, as if accidental
and unrelated. They were noticeable, but we wished for the best and hoped that
changes were transitional to some even better era. The changes were profound,
though, and brought on effects we may be reeling from to this day.
Let me say
that if you could only have one Jimi Hendrix record, I’d have to recommend Electric Ladyland, because it is the
most lush of his albums, offering him the largest canvass upon which to splash
his guitar artistry and his ever-better singing. It represents Hendrix’s most
expansive experiments with abstract electronic sounds, removed from song forms
as well as his most bluesy, most intimate guitar brilliance. On it, he is both
in the pocket with Mitchell (Redding and Chas Chandler were unhappy with the
sessions, and gone before their completion) and also free to dabble with other
players and Kramer, perhaps his most receptive partner.
Electric Ladyland also demarcates Hendrix’s steps away
from disciplined creativity into self-indulgence. One may hate the electronic
tracks “. . . And the Gods Made Love” and “Moon, Turn the Tides
Gently, Gently,” as much as one loves the whiplash of “Crosstown
Traffic,” the finger-and-foot-pedal dexterity of “Rainy Day, Dream
Away,” the drama of “House Burning Down” and prophetic vividness
of “All Along The Watchtower,” surely the most enduring version of a
Bob Dylan song anyone but Dylan has ever made. Hendrix produced in Electric Ladyland a work of
multi–dimensions every bit as contradictory as The White Album and more multi-faceted than just about anything
else. It is his crescendo, and everything that comes after is anti-climactic,
though some of it has merit, too.
I’ve never been big on Hendrix’s Band of Gypsies album, for instance, recorded over the two nights December 31, 1969 and January 1, 1970 at the Fillmore East, with his army buddy Billy Cox on bass and lumbering Buddy Miles on drums. Cox was with Hendrix, Mitch Mitchell on drums, the final time I saw him, at Madison Square Garden in later January, ’70, about which no matter how I try to remember, I draw a blank. Doing some research, I’ve found out why: This concert was a cavalcade of bands, Hendrix went on at three in the morning, had a problem with someone in the audience, played two songs and left the hall. For all I know I left before he did. Or had fallen asleep in my seat. I recall nothing at all. (However, my friend Steve Bloom attended that event as his first rock concert and wrote about it here).
I did enjoy
and still value another sighting of Hendrix, in the movie Woodstock, where he
plays “The Star Spangled Banner,” to stragglers awake in the morning
after a tumultuous weekend. He had planned to play last, and left a unique
impression on film, with a gut-wrenching rendition of this national anthem of
the U.S., complete with siren roars, the screams of bombs dropping, explosions,
and the stately theme carrying on, wounded, maybe shamed through it all. It’s
wonderful that this performance was recorded; it is one of the very few moments
in my lifetime when pop culture and avant-garde music have connected, and been
documented for mass consumption. I show it to classes and younger people who
don’t know it whenever I can.
But the
very end of Hendrix, as you probably know, was a bring-down. In September, at
age 27, he died as a result of combined drinking and drugging, choking on his
own vomit while he slept. What a waste, was all I could think of at the time.
What a disappointment. What an inelegant way to go. Jimi Hendrix wasn’t as on
top of the game as I’d thought after all.
Of course,
Janis Joplin died two weeks later. Brian Jones had died in July the year
before. Otis Redding was already long gone, in a plane crash in 1967. Jim
Morrison died nine months after Joplin. Louis Armstrong – it’s backwards to
call him the Hendrix of the trumpet — also died in July 1971. In September
’71, a bunch of burglars sent directly or nearly so by President Richard Nixon
broke into a psychiatrist’s office to find files of a national defense analyst
who has leaked the government’s secret history of the still-raging Viet Nam war
to the newspapers. The ’60s were over and the dispiriting ’70s well under
way.
It often
feels to me, since I’ve grown older, that those years were a watershed. Prior
to Hendrix’s death, there was some genuine progress towards peace, love,
understanding and music that could speak to the realities, hopes and dreams of
a world in regeneration. The progress came at the cost of significant lives,
yes, and with dislocations in the way things had been since I was born, after
World War II. After Hendrix’s death and Joplin’s and the beginning of the end
of the Beatles, Bob Dylan grabbing at straws to sustain himself, the Stones
descending further into debauchery, and some other cultural bummers I’m sure we
could come up with, that movement began to suffer a turnaround. The decade that
followed – musically ending in disco, the birth of punk rock and nascent
glimmers of rap – seems in retrospect pretty bleak.
Ok, I’m a baby boomer, of that age when we get downhearted and nostalgic, and that’s kind of a drag in itself. In the ’70s, the ’80s, the ’90s and now there’s been great, great music. In rock and soul: Aretha carried on as did James Brown, Stevie Wonder was at his best, Al Green, Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, the Clash, Earth Wind & Fire, George Clinton, Michael Jackson circa Off the Wall, the good old Grateful Dead – what, I’m still demonstrating that I’m old?
I don’t mean to be a wet blanket and spoil anybody’s idea of fun, and yet I insist Hendrix has not been equaled or topped. Stevie Ray Vaughan borrowed much, without nuance. I saw Prince perform in 1980 on his Dirty Mind tour and thought he was a Jimi-wannabe; I saw him again last January (2010) and he was thrilling but no . . . No guitarist-vocalist has turned up in 40 years who can grasp the moment and improve it to unite people in the imaginative way that Jimi did.
I dig George Benson when he’s on, Buddy Guy, Marc Ribot, Vernon Reid, Mary Halvorson – and there’s much good music now in the realms of soul (aka rap, hip-hop) jazz and blues. Pop I’m not so sure of. Art doesn’t stop when one person leaves the planet. And yet, if you want to know where the art of guitar-slinging is, of songwriting, of studio composition, of fantasy as it takes off from reality, you’ve got to check out Jimi Hendrix. Are you experienced? Mind you, “Not necessarily stoned,” as Hendrix put it in the title track of his debut album, issued (gasp!) more than four decades back, “but beautiful.”
He was, for too brief a time – not necessarily stoned but beautiful, and shared the best of it all. I’m so glad I was there and think you would have been, too.
I daresay the JazzBash! on Sunday, 9/11 is the first ever virtual hybrid Awards party/live Jazz Cruise auction/online concert from six U.S. cities/conference of activist panelists/bar with storytellers and presenters, live improvised painting, exclusive jazz photography exhibits and more — in immersive environments depicting noted jazz sites through which attendees — musicians, critics, the general public — can roam at will, by cursor.
video by Michal Shapiro — starts black but hit arrow!
Thanks to the genius of SyncSpace.live, the Jazz Journalists Association (of which I’m president, driving this production — promotion acknowledge!) is throwing a one-time-only, five-ring demonstration of what can be done, media-wise, to bring together individuals and groups in an online experience with interactive functionality beyond that of Zoom, for instance. “Rooms” in the customized JazzBash pay homage to the Jazz Showcase of Chicago, Sharp 9 Gallery in Durham NC, and the Blue Note NY, where many of the 20 archival performance videos were shot. Attendees can talk in groups or private side-chats, use text box, vote for art preferences — and bid in live auction for a stateroom on the Blue Note at Sea 23 cruise from Ft Lauderdale Jan 13 – 20, with stops in St. Maarten and St. Thomas — (minimum bid $700 for a $7000 value, contact CruiseBid2022@JazzJournalists.org).
Some 60 musicians are participating with live appearance or video messages, including winners of the 27th annual JJA Jazz Awards announced last April such as Musician of the Year Jon Batiste, Lifetime Achievement in Jazz honoree Sheila Jordan, Kenny Garrett for his Album of the Year Sounds from our Ancestor, reeds master Charles Lloyd, who won Midsized Ensemble of the Year with his band The Marvels (featuring guitarist Bill Frisell).
The point of all this is to show that digital media be very enjoyably and creatively used to convene, communicate, entertain and enlighten. We don’t have to sit in checkerboard squares as dull as office cubicles in order to have fun, or be productive, remotely. While sitting at our laptops we can leave our surroundings to commune with folks half-way ’round the world. It amazes me. No plane ticket necessary, no hotel room, and a great savings of time.
Maybe the pandemic is over, and in-person normality coming back. Wouldn’t that be nice? But if it ain’t, and we want to scale back traveling yet reach ever broader networks . . . there are alternatives. True, there will be no pressing of the flesh at the JazzBash!, group drinking will happen only on a distanced and byo basis, glad-handing will be virtual. Well, there’s nothing like the real thing — but the JazzBash! is a stab at an engaging second best.
I love the sound of a saxophone, or rather the broad range of sounds available from this family of reeds
The author, who has never been very serious about his alto playing, with apologies to Neil Tesser on tenor sax, Jim Baker on guitar; photo by Lauren Deutsch
instruments. Breathy, vocal-like, smooth, light, penetrating, gritty or greasy, able to cry and/or croon (sometimes both at once), it strikes me as capable of the most personal of musical statements, although that’s probably a projection based on my imagination set free listening to these horns, mostly in the context of jazz, for more than half a century.
But in some ways the sax seems a throwback. By the time I started actively seeking out music, electric guitars had asserted their dominance and ubiquity as the instrument of a successful, popular musician. Pianos are classy and useful; electric keyboards, including synthesizers, offer many more dimensions of sound production, notably polyphony, than horn players can summon only with the most assiduous practice.
It’s not just a matter of volume — electric wind instruments have been available for decades, but remain curiosities. In pop music, the sax has become conspicuous by its absence. To hear any saxophonics beyond the inanities of Kenny G and soul licks of Maceo Parker, you simply have to turn to jazz — with which the sax is virtually synonymous, having a leading if not fundamental role.
So who plays the saxophone? The schedule of the upcoming Chicago Jazz Festival, Sept 1 through 4 in the city’s Millennium Park tells us: Pulitizer Prize-winner Henry Threadgill, heading his unique band Zooid. Donald Harrison, 2022 NEA Master and Big Chief of The Congo Square Nation Afro-New Orleans Cultural Group.
Those gents are internationally or at least nationally known. That can’t be claimed so assuredly of Chicago’s own voracious, masterful sax players, but it should be. Greg Ward, Geoff Bradfield, Nick Mazzarella, Isaiah Collier and Lenard Simpson (from Milwaukee) are all playing the Jazz Fest. Each one has an audible identity, developed because one of the things that distinguishes saxophonists in jazz and adjacent creative music that they have something to say. They’re serious and use their horns to amplify their messages.
Chicago is a sax city. Although Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Charlie Parker and John Coltrane weren’t born here, they all passed through, leaving a mark. Sonny Rollins had an important residence here. But dig this roll call of Chicago saxophonists, in no particular order:
Saxophonists at a 1988 reunion of students of the late Capt. Walter Dyett, Chicago public high school band director: from left, Clifford Jordan, John Gilmore, Johnny Griffin, E. Parker MacDougal, Eddie Harris, Ed Petersen, Von Freeman, Jimmy Ellis photo by Lauren Deutsch
Franz Jackson, Bud Freeman, Gene Ammons, Johnny Griffin, Eddie Harris, John Gilmore, Eddie Shaw, Clifford Jordan, Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, Fred Anderson, Anthony Braxton, Douglas Ewart, John Klemmer, Edward Wilkerson, Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, Light Henry Huff, Don Myrick, Gene Dinwiddie, Steve Coleman, E. Parker McDougal, Pat Mallinger, Sharel Cassity, Diane Ellis, Jimmy Ellis, Clark Dean, Joe Daley, Art Porter Jr., Eddie Johnson, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Sonny Cox, Ira Sullivan, Pat Patrick, Ed House, Chris Madsen, J.T. Brown, Skinny Williams, John Brumbach, Vandy Harris, Edwin Daugherty, Mike Smith, Ari Brown, Boyce (Brother Mathew) Brown, Juli Wood, Eric Schneider, Frank Catalano, Roy McGrath, Dave Rempis, Mars Williams, Shawn Maxwell, Keefe Jackson, Chris Greene, Cameron Pfiffner, Mark Colby, Ken Vandermark, Fred Jackson Jr., Gene Barge, A.C. Reed, Mai Sugimoto, Hal Russel, Jeff Vega, Hal Ra Ru, and of course Von Freeman
The Freemans, from left: Bruz, Von, Chico, George; photo by Lauren Deutsch
— to whom the Fest opening suite, “Vonology” is dedicated by his advocate and protege guitarist Mike Allemana (recent collaborator with saxophonist Chico Freeman in a community celebration of Freeman family, including 95 year old uncle George).
Current elders of the saxophone who deserve reference include first and foremost Mr. Rollins (ret’d), Wayne Shorter (ret’d), Charles Lloyd, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, Marshall Allen, Houston Person, and Charles McPherson. They purr, yowl, preach and persuade, a lot like they’re talking to you. They blow so you’ll listen.
written in 2013 to annotate his solo bass (!) album The Bridge, which he described as “my most personal and challenging release so far.”
Solo bass records are rare, and might seem to appeal mostly to bassists and bass aficionados. But on The Bridge Charnett Moffett, the charismatic bass virtuoso with an impressive past and equally brilliant future, has proven here — without benefit of a band — that his music can touch anyone who loves music, regardless of instrumentation or genre.
Alone with his upright bass, Moffett has created an engaging hour of organic, richly detailed and fundamentally physical sounds. He lays down 20 concise and immediately enjoyable performances, exploring motifs that have had true resonance for him throughout his formidable career. He establishes his links to the lineage of iconic jazz bassists, and demonstrates his personal, advanced techniques for this heaviest of stringed instruments, the tether that, since its invention, has bound melody, harmony and rhythm together. He gives himself unstintingly to this project and, so doing, renews himself.
In fact, this is Charnett’s process: He has never stopped growing throughout the three decades he has been at the heart of bravenew music. Receiving his first bass (a half-sized one) at age seven, recording that year– and then touring Japan with the Moffett Family Band–Charnett
has been at the ‘bottom’ of things (pun intended) from the beginning of his musical life. His father Charles was a drummer with Ornette Coleman, and so as a youngster Charnett was always around jazz royalty. He auditioned for Charles Mingus when he was nine.
He attended The High School of Music and Art (the “Fame” high school), Mannes College of Music and Juilliard, which he left at age 16 to hit the road in the band of Wynton Marsalis. In his 20’s he worked steadily with guitarist Stanley Jordan, the all-star Manhattan Jazz Quintet and legendary drummer Tony Williams in addition to recording under his own name for Blue Note. He’s been a collaborative sideman in quartet with Ornette and Denardo Coleman and Geri Allen, with Art Blakey, Harry Connick Jr., McCoy Tyner (for five years), Bette Midler, David Sanborn, Branford Marsalis and, most recently, Melody Gardot. Even when he’s been in a supportive role, Charnett’s focused and energetic solos have frequently inspired audience ovations.
The Bridge casts him as the beneficiary of musical wisdom passed along by such eminences as Ray Brown, Charles Mingus, Paul Chambers, Scott Lafaro, Stanley Clarke, Ron Carter, Bobby McFerrin and Sting, and he does this lineage proud.
Moffett launches his CD program with “Caravan”, the Juan Tizol song that Duke Ellington made famous (with bassist Jimmy Blanton, among others). This was his feature with the Manhattan Jazz Quintet, a group that he joined when he was 17 and remained a key member of for 25 years. He follows it with the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby,” repertoire from the opposite pole of the pop music continuum, famously covered by his former musical comrade Stanley Jordan. Here Charnett offers a singular interpretation that evokes the original’s poignancy and includes a counterline Paul McCartney, the tune’s main composer, might envy.
“Black Codes from the Underground” is a composition from Wynton Marsalis’s now-classic album of the same name, which first positioned Charnett among his ‘Young Lions’ peers, including not only the Marsalis brothers but also pianist Kenny Kirkland and drummer Jeff “Tain” Watts. The piece holds special memories for Charnett: he played it live at the Grammys in 1986, which was, of course, an enormous thrill for a teenager at an early point in his career. One of the glories of this track is Charnett’s embrace of the entirety of his instrument: the slap of wood as well as the throb of fiber and ringing tone. Then there is his fierce attack, and that indestructible repeating riff, reprised from the original rendition, which has earned jazz-hit status.
Charnett became a fan of Sting when Branford Marsalis and Kenny Kirkland joined his band, and cites the lyrical “Fragile” as a Sting composition that reflects how he himself feels about some of the difficult passages of life. Next is “Haitian Fight Song” by Charles Mingus, which Charnett took as a chance, as he says, “to utilize my own style, rather than to emulate his, and to pay my respects.”
Moffet’s “Kalengo” spotlights the age-old Western European classical technique of bow-tapping in alternation with conventionally bowed and plucked passages. “The song is inspired by Chick Corea, but has an open harmonic structure and concept about modulation during improvisation that I learned from Ornette,” explains Charnett. “Bow Song” is another conjunction of influences: “It’s classical in orientationâ€, he acknowledges, “but it was really inspired by Paul Chambers’ version of ‘Yesterdays’ from his album Bass On Top, one of my favorites.â€
The idea of pairing the early 19th century Negro spiritual“Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho” with 21st century Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep”– “the oldest song on the record with the newest,” as Charnett mentions – came from Mary Ann Topper, the co-producer of The Bridge, who was also a key figure in Charnett’s ’80s career breakout. “Skip Hop,†says the bassist, “is about having some fun. I remember a gig I did with Ornette in Belfast, where the musicians were playing bagpipes, and it was really swinging. It was an Irish jig … and I just slowed down the tempo for ‘Skip Hop.’ By the way,†he adds, “Moffett is actually an Irish name!”
It was also Ms. Topper who urged Charnett to record Thelonious Monk’s “Round Midnight,” “Well You Needn’t” and “Rhythm-A-Ning” as a medley. “That was challenging, but it came out nicely,” the bassist comments. “The Slump” which seems positively buoyant, was composed by Tony Williams, with whom Charnett toured and recorded in the late ’80s; “The Slump” was his feature with Williams’ band. “Oversun” is Charnett’s easy-does-it evocation of the self-contained call and response vocal gambit of one of his favorite musicians, Bobby McFerrin. “Swinging Etude” is another nod to Ornette Coleman: “Like McCoy Tyner, Ornette has been one of my most significant teachers,” Charnett asserts, and indeed, Tyner’s tour-de-force “Walk Spirit, Talk Spirit” comes next. It was Charnett’s feature while playing with the iconic pianist.
“Truth” first appeared on Nettwork, Moffet’s 1991 Blue Note/Manhattan Records production. It demonstrates his remarkable ability to depict harmony, melody and rhythm as one entity, rather than as separate though intertwined strands. On this album’s title track, “The Bridge (Solo Bass Works),” Charnett takes his instrumental mastery and unique concept even further, having been inspired to imagine what Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of The Bumblebee†might sound like on the bass. See our man working up this track in the studio by putting this CD into your computer and viewing the video included as “enhanced CD” content [click link on photo above].
By this point in the program we’ve heard the threads that run through every Moffett musical interpretation: muscle leavened by tenderness, vitality tempered by humility, daring matched by accomplishment. These qualities are again present in his rendition of Nat “King” Cole’s “Nature Boy”as well as in the snappy “Things Ain’t What They Used To Be,” a tribute to the late, great Ray Brown, who borrowed the Ellington song to use as his own theme. They are likewise found in the one over-dubbed track on The Bridge, “All Blues,” which makes reference to Paul Chambers, Miles Davis and Ron Carter, and in Charnett’s concluding original, “Free Your Mind,” which offers a taste of his unique deployment of electronics with the upright bass, a powerful effect in his live performances.
Charnett’s 20 performances on The Bridge revel in the breadth of his creativity and musical identity, as indelible as the thrum of his thumb. “I wanted to do something that would express who I am, carry on the tradition of the greats who preceded me, and also contribute to the art form by challenging myself to construct my own standard of solo-bass excellence,” he states. “I think it’s imperative that an artist work in such ways.â€
And so, thanks to this gifted bassist, we have it all: The connection between joy and effort, ambition and fulfillment, the past and the present. Complete even when totally alone, Charnett Moffett isThe Bridge.
