The 18th annual free Englewood Jazz Festival in south side Hamilton Park last Saturday (9/16) affirmed the best of Chicago's grassroots culture, promoting an opposite image of this challenged neighborhood as a dangerous place -- unless one fears powerful, creative music that speaks as directly as dance rhythms to its family of listeners. Produced on behalf of the Live the Spirit Residency by saxophonist Ernest Dawkins -- current AACM Chicago chairperson, Park District music teacher and every-Sunday star at Norman's Bistro, who led … [Read more...]
My Q&A for Blues@Greece & Spirit of Jazz Award
Jazz, blues, American literature and where I'd go for a day in a time machine are topics I address in an email interview with Michalis Limnios who blogs at Blue@Greece. I post this item out of sheer vanity, reinforced by my being presented with a Spirit of Jazz Award tomorrow (9/16) by the Englewood Jazz Festival, taking place from noon to 6 pm on Chicago's South Side in Hamilton Park, not far from where I grew up. Performers include saxophonist and organizer Ernest Dawkins, singers Dee Alexander and Carolyn Fitzhugh, the Live the Spirit … [Read more...]
Youssou N’Dour on stage & screen, PoKempner photos
Photo-journalist Marc PoKempner's images from the Chicago Jazz Fest, as featured in my previous post, and these from Senegalese superstar Youssou N'Dour's rousing who two weeks earlier, exhibit how he's dealing straightforwardly and creatively with the screen backing musicians at the Pritzker Pavilion of Millennium Park. Giving us eyefuls to enjoy. Here's what we can see -- as PoKempner proves, without post-production; the double images are the videographers' superimpositions -- when visually-conscious, kinetic performing artists are … [Read more...]
Jazz on Millennium Park’s big screen – PoKempner photos
A 40-by-22½-foot LED screen is a dominating feature of the stage in the Pritzker Pavilion of Chicago's Millennium Park, difficult to ignore though many try. Photographer Marc PoKempner does the opposite in his shots from the 39th annual Chicago Jazz Festival: he uses what he (and everybody else) sees to create striking images, in the best tradition of artists in his medium. howardmandel.com Subscribe by Email | Subscribe by RSS | Follow on Twitter All JBJ posts | … [Read more...]
Chicago Jazz Fest expanded review & Deutsch photos
My DownBeat review of the 39th annual Chicago Jazz Festival held over Labor Day weekend in and spilling out of Millennium Park, highlights the best I heard -- including the specially organized big band led by trumpeter Jon Faddis, making big fun from his mentor Dizzy Gillespie's fresh-as-fire arrangements dating 60 to 70 years back. (Gotta wonder what a music fan raised on the past decades' pop, country and rap but who never heard anything like this would make of the power of 16 players so synced in rhythm, tune and spirit, partying with … [Read more...]
Jazz/Improv Chicago: Wide-ranging talents, free fests, PoKempner pix
Chicago's jazz/improvised music scene contains multitudes, last week ranging from the wild yet earnest Liberation Music Collective to veteran piano sophisticate Michael Weiss in trio, as two of Marc PoKempner's photos document (and more of his vision, focused on links between local music and politics -- Obama included -- is on exhibit titled "Harold's Got the Blues" for the next month at the restaurant Wishbone). The Liberation Music Collective, a young ensemble led by bassist-vocalist-lyricist Hannah Fidler and trumpeter-conductor Matt … [Read more...]
War for laughs: Marx Brothers, Strangelove, Chaplin, Lehrer
My father taught me at age 8 to trust the Marx Brothers' for trenchant social commentary. Here's Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Zeppo in Duck Soup. On the night of my 17th birthday I sat in a theater, alone, watching the incomparable Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb . . . Thanks to Peter Sellers, Peter Bull (still Russian ambassador?), Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern and Peter George for a great one-sided phone call. No confidence there will be such diplomatic efforts. Dr. Strangelove was on a … [Read more...]
The Jazz & Blues Art Box — instant collection, rare data trove
Two hundred and thirty dvds of concerts and 96 interviews from the International Jazzfestival Bern (Switzerland), 1983 to 2002, 20 yearbooks plus a 344-page large format graphics-rich volume, in a cabinet on wheels standing almost 4 feet tall, 3 feet wide, 15 inches deep. Released as a one-time-only edition with a promise of no reissues and the dvds (in PAL format, playable on my Mac) constituting a single unit never to be split up. Cost: $8,400 USD. The Jazz & Blues Art Box is a phenomenon unto itself, the ultimate gift for the connoisseur … [Read more...]
Great new jazz photography: Sánta’s faces of Northsea Jazz Fest
The faces of jazz musicians Sánta István Csaba hears, sees and snaps are indelibly expressive -- like the memorable phrases, inspired improvisations and magical connections these players play, so meaningful to listeners in the moment, remembered or recorded. JazzTimes magazine has published some of Sánta's images from the Northsea Jazz Festival in early July -- here are more, not included in that publication. Northsea, held in the Hague, is a multi-stage, non-stop, international showcase of bands on tour now. Having worked with him … [Read more...]
Great new jazz photography — Dee Kalea’s campaign
Dee Kalea of Creative Music Photography is old school, in that she's created black and white images of jazz musicians in performance, closeup, usually one-to-a-frame. The passion she's captured, however, is timeless. How she became alert to the precise moment of creative rapture, and intimate with the music beyond the musicians themselves, is a story she tells best herself, in her intro and slide show for the Indegogo campaign she's mounted to raise funds for printmaking, support of public presentations and archival preservation of … [Read more...]
Great new jazz photography: Geri Allen by Sánta István Csaba
Pianist-composer Geri Allen, at age 60 a cancer victim, was photographed several times recently by Sánta István Csaba. He caught glimpses of her spirit and mourns her deeply. "I saw her about five weeks ago here in Torino," Sánta writes from where he now lives, "and in April in Switzerland. She was in a good mood and smiling. So unbelievable." I was fortunate to have met Geri Allen in soon after she'd arrived to New York City in the early 1980s, having graduated from Howard University. I interviewed her for National … [Read more...]
Great new jazz photography #2: Lauren Deutsch’s Made in Chicago portfolio
"Made in Chicago" is true of the photography of Lauren Deutsch, and also the name of the four-day-long collaborative jazz festival she's organized in Poznan, Poland for the past 12 years as artistic director (formerly with Wojceich Juszcsak) on behalf of the Jazz Institute of Chicago. The theme of this year's fest was "Freedom." The photos here of Chicago-based musicians (click to enlarge), in which Deutsch tries to capture the sound of the music through camera movement, were taken in May … [Read more...]
Great new jazz photography: Marc PoKempner portfolio from New Orleans
Photos of musicians making music -- visualizations stirred in the photographers by watching sounds manifest -- are exciting, and as different in style as the photographers and musicians themselves. Marc PoKempner 's portfolio from New Orleans of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band with Cuban drummers at the Music Box Village, a non-profit community arts garden, is the first of a series of great new jazz photos I'll post over the next few days. Check back … [Read more...]