Archives for December 11, 2009

Thanks to Bill Royston for calling our attention to a strange turn of events at a jazz festival in Spain. Here is beginning of The Guardian‘s story about the incident:

Jazzman Larry Ochs has seen many things during 40 years playing his saxophone around the world but, until this week, nobody had ever called the police on him.
That changed on Monday night however, when’s Spain’s pistol-carrying Civil Guard police force descended on the Sigüenza Jazz festival to investigate allegations that Ochs’s music was not, well, jazz.
Police decided to investigate after an angry jazz buff complained that the Larry Ochs Sax and Drumming Core group was on the wrong side of a line dividing jazz from contemporary music.
The jazz purist claimed his doctor had warned it was “psychologically inadvisable” for him to listen to anything that could be mistaken for mere contemporary music.

To read the whole thing, go here.
This raises the perpetual question, “What is jazz?” and gives a perfect excuse to once again provide Sid Caesar’s attempt to answer it.

That nearly subliminal face at the end was Carl Reiner’s. He doesn’t know, either.

The Kennedy Center Honors ceremony held last Sunday will be televised on CBS December 29. In the meantime, the White House has released a clip of President Obama’s informal talk at the reception before the event. It runs about 18 minutes, with the camera on the President the whole time. The following video, nicely edited and produced, incorporates a shortened version of his remarks and interaction with the honorees, Dave Brubeck, Mel Brooks, Grace Bumbry, Robert De Niro and Bruce Springsteen. I thought you would find it interesting.

(When the video ends, it goes to black and hangs there, evidently forever. That’s how the White House provided it. If you click on your “reload” symbol in the address bar at the top of your screen, it goes back to normal.)