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Jazz Beyond Jazz

Howard Mandel's Urban Improvisation

Central Brooklyn Jazz Fest reiterates jazz/race divide

The Central Brooklyn Jazz Festival, during what the Smithsonian Institution promotes as Jazz Appreciation Month, is a powerful statement of hard core, grass-roots support for the music Congress has ratified as “a rare and valuable American national treasure.” My City Arts column reports on how the fest and other Brooklyn jazz activities, despite best intentions, reprise the distances and suspicions people of diverse backgrounds hold about each other.

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Central Brooklyn Jazz Festival goes to roots, future, justice

My column in City Arts highlights the 40-event Central Brooklyn Jazz Festival, taking place throughout April “from Flatbush up Fulton Avenue through the neighborhoods of Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Ocean Hill to Bushwick . . . the area that gave birth to Max Roach and Randy Weston some 80 years ago.” It’s booked with lesser-known yet highly active African-American jazz musicians; on Saturday I talk about “Where is Jazz Going?” at Medgar Evers College (2 to 6 pm) in distinguished company.

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Howard Mandel

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

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