January 2008 Archives

One image of jazz in 2007 sticks with me most: Thelonious Monk at Starbucks.

When I paid for my latte at New York's JFK airport in November, there he was, looking right at me from the cover of "The Measure of Monk," the latest checkout-counter CD compilation offered by the coffee chain.

Hell, if those folks ordering frappuccinos can learn to say "Crepuscule with Nellie" (track seven on the new CD), I might just learn to say "tall" when I really mean "small," or "venti" for "large." Had this uncoolest of coffee chains suddenly turned hip? Could Monk's dark tone clusters really sell to the masses alongside the biscotti and bittersweet chocolates? As it turns out, yes.

The Open Society Institute, sponsor of the Katrina Media Fellowship that funded my work in New Orleans, has created a fascinating new website, "Katrina: An Unnatural Disaster". (My own page on the site is here.) It's a great resource, not least because it allows you to explore and cross-reference various strands of the post-Katrina New Orleans experience (culture, insurance, criminal justice, etc.). as well as across media (print, radio, photography, film). I'm in brilliant company in this fellowship, as you'll see, all of us responding to an unnatural disaster by doing what comes naturally -- getting and telling the stories.

The OSI press release is below.

Clarinetist Evan Christopher, a California native, moved to New Orleans in 1994. In his frequent duets with Tom McDermott, and as a standout member of trumpeter Irvin Mayfield's New Orleans Jazz Orchestra, his erudite and personalized approach to traditional jazz commands attention.

Long before the floods that devastated his city, clarinetist Michael White wrestled with the challenge of preserving New Orleans traditional jazz without embalming it. He sought to write tunes built on time-honored local forms that spoke to the here-and-now. But Dr. White struggled to compose anything at all during the past three years--until late 2007, when original music began pouring forth.

Dee Dee Bridgewater
Red Earth: A Malian Journey (DDB Records/Emarcy/Universal) Despite her place in the top rank of American jazz vocalists and her crossover success, Dee Dee Bridgewater has often felt displaced. "I'm always trying to fit in somewhere," she once told me. This new disc, which finds Ms. Bridgewater and her band in collaboration with a cast of Malian musicians and singers, is no further pose: