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Jazz Beyond Jazz

Howard Mandel's Urban Improvisation

Today’s the day NYC goes beyond jazz

On September 17,New York kicks off a fall season more highly charged with new creative energies than any in memory. An army of mostly young, skilled, ambitious and devoted musicians is making itself heard in the East Village, Soho, Brooklyn, on the Lower West Side and in the clubs — while benevolence is cast by the first ever performance — at last — of Ornette Coleman at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Sept. 26.

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Life’s a pitch: Where are the women jazz listeners?

Amanda Ameer, blogger behind artjournal’s Life’s a Pitch, was bummed by the low number of women at pianist Brad Mehldau’s recent Village Vanguard performance (but glad about the audience’s wide age-spread). She cites jazz women instrumentalists as being rare, too. What’s up with this, she wants to know. Send her “the literature on this topic.”

Well, there isn’t any —  jazz commentators have to depend upon anecdotal experience and personal observation as basis for their speculations and analysis about jazz audiences, as so many other topics. From my perspective, though, women don’t dislike jazz — throughout my life I’ve been involved with women who like it plenty. Of course, I select all my friends for that trait, but my interactions have also included undergraduate students in my NYU classes on American music over the past 23 years, and my mother who, never before an avid fan, in her early ’80s has taken up jazz appreciation courses (and complains that most of the presentations harken to an ever-more-quickly-receding Swing Era).

The problem is that no one in the jazz world, with the exception of jazz educators, has pleasantly invited women to partake of the music. Rather than being marketed to, women have been neglectfully, perhaps unconsciously, shut out.

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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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