As a generation of jazz elders leaves our world -- some hastened by the pandemic -- their faces as photographed by Sánta István Csaba become even more luminous, haunting, iconic. Guiseppi Logan, multi-instrumentalist (May 1935 - April 2020) Henry Grimes, bassist (Nov 1935 - April 2020) Pianists Geri Allen (June 1957 - June 2017) and McCoy Tyner (Dec 1938 - March 2020) Wallace Roney, trumpeter (May 1960 - March 2020) Lee Konitz, alto saxophonist, improviser (Oct 1927 - April 2020) Bucky Pizzarelli, guitarist (Jan 1926 - April … [Read more...]
JazzOnLockdown: Musicians, venues, .orgs — writers? — turn to live-streaming
It's the most obvious, available and so far low-cost option for anyone who can cast a performance online for public consumption -- jazz musicians specifically included: Live-streaming. Fred Hersch has been first out of the box, committing to live-streaming daily mini concerts from his living room, 1pm Eastern Daily Time (10am PST, 7pm in Europe) -- https://www.facebook.com/fredherschmusic. As New York, California, Illinois and other U.S. locales request and/or require a suspension of public gatherings, the personal … [Read more...]
Jazz vs. lockdown: Blogs w/ vid clips defy virus muting musicians
image by John Fenton Jazz doesn't want to stay home and chill -- so members of the Jazz Journalists Association launched on Monday, 3/15/2020, JazzOnLockdown: Hear It Here, a series of curated v-logs featuring performance videos of musicians whose gigs have been postponed or cancelled due to coronavirus concerns. The initial JOL post, by Madrid blogger Mirian Arbalejo (of MissingDuke.com) is dedicated to Marcelo Peralta, Argentine born/Spanish resident saxophonist-composer-arranger who is reportedly the first jazz musician to succumb to … [Read more...]
Mardi Gras’ lewd Krewe, Marc Pokempner’s photos
Krewe du Vieux Carré puts on the most satirical and scatalogical of New Orlean's pre-Mari Gras parades, says photo-journalist Marc PoKempner, whose images © here provide convincing evidence. PoKempner writes: "Our dysfunctional evil-clown-in-chief figured prominently in this years’ Krewe du Vieux parade and the immediately following krewedelusion -- an annual outpouring of satirical, political, scatological and outrageous imagery that can always be counted on to top the charts of the crude, lewd and rude. At once the most topical and … [Read more...]
Chicago Jazz fest images, echoes
Roscoe Mitchell onscreen, presiding over The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Pritzker Pavillion Millennium Park Chicago, 8/30/19photo (c) Marc PoKempner The 41st annual Chicago Jazz Festival has come and gone, as I reported for DownBeat.com in quick turnaround. I stand by my lead that the music was epic -- cf. Marc PoKempner's beautiful image of the Art Ensemble of Chicago at Pritzker Pavillion, facing east towards Mecca just before their African percussion-driven orchestral set. And epochal, yes: the Art Ensemble is 50 years old, as discussed … [Read more...]
Transcending Toxic Times with street poetry & music
My DownBeat article about Transcending Toxic Times, the compulsively listenable, critically political album by the Last Poets produced by electric bassist/composer Jamaaladeen Tacuma, includes a lot of quotes from my interviews with him and poet Abiudon Oyewale. from left: Baba Donn Babatunde, Jamaaaladeen Tacuma (in front), Umar Bin Hassan, Abiodun Oyewole I reproduced some of the searing imagery/lyrics on the recording, and provided background on how these men have been calling out American mendacy and hypocrity for half-a-century, as … [Read more...]
Digging Our Roots videos, speakers inspire engagement
Billy Branch watches Sonny Boy (Rice Miller) Williamson II; photo by Alan Frolichstein Nearly 100 Chicagoans (maybe some visitors?) watched Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Junior Wells, Buddy Guy and other heroes of the blues on videos at the Cultural Center Thursday night (5/23/19), with harmonica star Billy Branch and WDCB program host Leslie Keros telling stories and participated in lively interplay with knowing attendees. It was the fifth Digging Our Roots: Chicago's Greatest Hits "listening session" this spring, co-presented by the Jazz … [Read more...]
Audio-video jazz improv: Mn’Jam Experiment, w/teens
What's really new in improvisational music? Where else can innovation go? Mn'JAM Experiment -- singer Melissa Oliveira and her visual/electronics/turntablist partner JAM -- are daring to mix high-tech audio-with-video media in live performance, and as they say, it's an experiment, in a direction that live performance seems sure to go. Mn'JAM, photo by Charlotte Steunebrink Grounded in jazz fundamentals (call and response, in-the-moment interactions, individualized expression, rhythmic drive, repertoire; she went to Berklee, he to New … [Read more...]
2018 jazz, blues and beyond deaths w/ links
Cecil Taylor, March 15, 1929 – April 5, 2018, photo by Sánta István Csaba Not a happy post, but a useful one: here are the hundreds of musicians and music industry activists who died in 2018, as compiled by photographer-writer Ken Franckling for the Jazz Journalists Association. Ken scoured local newspapers, the Jazzinstitut Darmstadt newsletter, AllAboutJazz.com, Wikipedia, the New York Times, Legacy.com, Rolling Stone, Variety, JazzTimes.com, blogs, listserves, Facebook pages and European publications. Links to their fuller … [Read more...]
Legacies of Music Makers
The deaths of multi-instrumentalist Joseph Jarman, best known as the face-painted shaman of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Alvin Fielder, re-conceptualizing drummer, remind us that artists' contributions to music extend beyond recordings and awards. Read my essay at NPR Music, commissioned by Nate Chinen of WBGO, on the enduring legacies of Jarman and Fielder, both founding members of the still thriving Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) NY and Chicago). … [Read more...]
Synth and-sushi bar, Chicago (future jazz, present tense)
K-rAd freely improvised and spontaneously composed an original, pulsing, burbling, chiming, floating and ripping, multi-layered, deep and flowing funky-bassed, percussion-lively suite over about three hours last night (7/25/18), using his elaborate, sound-unbound Euro-rack synthesizer setup to stir, smooth and spice social interactions in a seemingly unlikely Chicago venue for such a thing. Down an alley, through a back door (see the bright red arrow) down in a basement of Sushi Dokku in Chicago's fashionable W. Randolph Street dining … [Read more...]
Cecil Taylor, dead at 89, as celebrated when he’d turned 80
The brilliant, challenging, perplexing and incomparable pianist/improviser/composer Cecil Taylor died April 5, 2018, at age 89. Here's what I wrote of him to celebrate his 80th birthday: Cecil Taylor, unique and predominant, 80 years old 3 27 09 Cecil Taylor is the world's predominant pianist by virtue of his technique, concept and imagination, and one of 20th-21st Century music's magisterial modernists. A figure through whose challenges I investigate the avant garde in Miles Ornette Cecil -- Jazz Beyond Jazz, he turned 80 on March 25 (or … [Read more...]
Jazz and beyond projects with 2018 NEA funding support
Given all the noise, the National Endowment for the Arts' $25 mil for arts, literature and education announced Feb. 7 may have been overlooked. But these funds and the projects they support, nationwide, should be noted. From more than $3 million going to initiatives strictly labeled "Music" (exclusive of "Musical Theater" or "Opera") here's my subjective selection of 50 grants referencing "jazz" and beyond. The largest amounts among them go to Carnegie Hall to celebrate Philip Glass's 80th birthday ($85k and there's a second grant on … [Read more...]