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It's almost time for the Deer Isle Jazz Festival in Stonington, Maine. For eight years, I've helped bring great jazz to this tiny Down East Maine island. In that time, both the fest and I have grown. This year's event is a New Orleans blowout (more on that in my next post). Here's a recent piece I wrote for Jazziz, about my experiences as volunteer producer.

MAINE ATTRACTION

by Larry Blumenfeld

"Condoms. Tampons. Excess hair. SMALL AN-I-MALS!"

So sang the dozen folks forming a circle within a tiny cabin last July, holding that last syllable until Arturo O'Farrill dropped his right hand with a conductor's authority. I'd just made the nine-hour drive from Brooklyn, New York, to Deer Isle, Maine, but my bleary eyes found strength to widen. I laughed.

I'd walked in on a rehearsal for Haystack, The Opera: An Afro-Cuban Jazz Odyssey -- and it was no joke. O'Farrill's wife, Alison, sat at a keyboard, his eldest son, Zack, before a set of conga drums. His youngest, Adam, held a trumpet, awaiting his cue. Soon various rhythm instruments -- hand drums, cowbells, guiros, clavés -- were handed out.

Before long, O'Farrill had these painters and potters and sculptors, all of whom had come to the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts for a summer session, creating four layers of rhythm and sounding pretty damn in-sync.

O'Farrill had come to Maine to headline at the annual Deer Isle Jazz Festival, for which I've been volunteer producer since its inception, in 2001. Each summer, one festival musician serves as artist-in-residence at the Haystack School. O'Farrill, a celebrated pianist and bandleader, the son of a legendary Cuban composer, met this challenge by bringing his whole family and creating an opera, with lyrics drawn from Haystack Director Stuart Kestenbaum's work -- not his celebrated poetry, but his school manual, the part about "what not to flush down the toilet."

I was saddened to hear of the passing of one of the great bassists and true innovators of modern music, Israel "Cachao" López, at 89. You can find an obit by Enrique Fernandez, from the Miami Herald here And here's a column I did for the April issue of Jazziz that talks about some seminal tracks.

Given Herbie Hancock's surprising Best Album Grammy win, I thought I'd forward this piece I wrote late last year about the recording, for Jazziz magazine's Jan/Feb. issue.

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.

In general, signs of decay on a New Orleans building is a bad thing. Not so for the gorgeous dilapidation of Preservation Hall. You won't find much real jazz on Bourbon Street these days. But not far from it, there is -- and I'd like to think, will always be -- Preservation Hall. Here's a short appreciation of the hall and its wonderful recent boxed-set release, as appeared in The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday:

Three distinct groups lined up on St. Peter Street, just off Bourbon Street, one recent Sunday evening. The first awaited tall cocktails called "Hurricanes" at Pat O'Brien's bar. The second had signed up for a "ghost tour" through the French Quarter. The third sought passage through the iron gates at 726, better known as Preservation Hall. Once inside, that last group sat in a dusty room on benches and narrow floor cushions, sans food or beverages, seeking to drink in only traditional jazz and to commune with a singularly haunted spot.

Through my months on end in New Orleans during the past two years, few have inspired me on and off the bandstand and especially in the streets like the members of the Hot 8 Brass Band. In a city pushing hard to move forward yet ever-pulled by its powerful past, hit hard by tragedy yet soothed by transcendent charms, no band better embodies these complicated tensions, nor the simple power of African rhythms, modern black music, and the second-line parade.

I'm in New York now, where the Hot 8 will swing through and, in the space of four days, play Joe's Pub (11/24) and the Lincoln Center tree-lighting (11/26), and, along with me, present a workshop/discussion for students at Harlem's Urban Assembly School for the Performing Arts (11/27).

Here's what I had to say about the band in this week's Village Voice:

Let me take you where classic jazz was made back in the day. We'll meet not in some dark smoky Greenwich Village bar but on a quiet lane in Dix Hills. Indeed, important jazz landmarks lie well beyond the five boroughs and past big-city limits. The roots of a musical genre and a culture identified as a quintessentially urban American experience are nonetheless planted in suburban soil.

On Long Island's North Shore, a real estate deal alluring was trumped by a love supreme.

Here's the full text of my Op-Ed. piece in today's New York Times, about John Coltrane's former home in Huntington, Long Island -- now on the National Register of Historic Places, and soon, I hope, to be an innovative shrine to jazz history. And here's a site where you can find out more.