Howard Mandel's Urban Improvisation
Visionary saxophonist Albert Ayler liked to stare at the sun, which may have led to his drowning at age 34 in 1970. An upstart 7-hour outdoor festival celebrates the heedlessly ecstatic spirit of his music tomorrow, July 10, at Riverwalk Commons of Roosevelt Island, in the very waters where the man-beyond-jazz breathed his last.
Globalism held its head high at the tenth annual Ponta Delgada Jazz Festival last week. Five nights of concerts performed by an international coterie of improvisers in the superb acoustics of a nicely modernized old center-city theater for a stylish, educated audience didn’t seem a cultural far cry, though they were held in the capital of the Azores, the mid-Atlantic archipelago 700 miles from mainland Portugal.