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Jazz Beyond Jazz

Howard Mandel's Urban Improvisation

Toxic Gowanus, Brooklyn neighb of new music lofts

Gowanus, a Brooklyn neighborhood so unlovely it’s been named an EPA superfund site, 03gowanus_CA0-articleLarge.jpgis Ground Zero now for music lofts, as reported in my new City Arts-New York column. In a half dozen or so artist-run spaces — including IBeam, Douglas Street Collective, Littlefield, the Brooklyn Lyceum and Issue Project Room — available for presentation and rehearsal of hard-core experimental sounds, dance, video and performance art, the programming is typically spiky, ambitious and unsentimental.

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Tragedy of bike-riding cabaret activist Mary Cleere Haran

mary cleere haran.jpeg

Mary Cleere Haran – promotional photo, no copyright infringement intended

Cabaret is a forum for the classic American pop song — and the death of singer Mary Cleere Haran, hit by a car coming out of a driveway while she was riding her bike in Deerfield Beach, Fla., robs the world of an activist who interpreted, updated and preserved those brilliant, melodious standards. The genre and milieu in which she worked isn’t my preferred entertainment, but there’s no denying the centrality in sophisticated contemporary culture of the words and music of Rodgers and Hart and Hammerstein, Cole Porter, Frank Loesser, Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Johnny Mercer and the many others celebrated by Haran, age 58, who wrote and produced shows and contributed significantly to television documentaries about the stars and songs of the U.S. in the mid 20th Century. Though there are performers as devoted to sustaining this legacy of wit and glamor as she, when an artist as deeply into their speciality it taken from the stage in their prime, that specialty is severely wounded, too.

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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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