Jazz beyond Jazz: October 2008 Archives

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

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

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

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