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Jazz Beyond Jazz

Howard Mandel's Urban Improvisation

Confession: Deaf to Gospel

I may burn at the stake for political incorrectness, but it’s the truth: I have an intense aversion to gospel music. My distaste dates to a haunting childhood vision in which an overwhelming Mahalia Jackson is routed by a malevolent clown.


As George Bernard Shaw wrote in 1894 (brought to my attention by colleague Francis Davis) “It is one of the inevitable evils of my profession [he was then reviewing music for a London daily] that I am asked to go to all manner of places; but hitherto I have drawn the line at going to church. Among the pious I am a scoffer: among the musical I am religious.”
My own story on the separation of church and taste, delving into a deep-seated suspicion of music used in the evangelical projection of religious faith and my embrace of the spirit of Pan via a 1959 Kraft Music Hall tv show of transcendent/subversive Harpo Marx is related in the “Epiphanies” column, the last-page of The Wire — Adventures in Modern Music(London) #285, November 2007.
Also in the issue: reports on Addis Ababa’s “Ethio-jazz” innovator Maluta Astatke, an interview with aging hardcore free-jazz saxophonist Sonny Simmons, and reviews of many sound sources and considerations — The Roots of Chicha: Psychedelic Cumbias from Peru, “Persian Electronic Music,” A Manifest For Silence: Confronting The Politics And Culture Of Noise — unlikely to get much notice elsewhere. On international newstands everywhere?

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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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