Archives for 2011

Creative Music Studio, Woodstock at Columbia U and East Village

My CityArts – New York column is about the Creative Music Symposium, organized by Karl Berger, pianist/vibist with his wife Ingrid Sertso, who cofounded with free-thinking Ornette Coleman of the Creative Music Studio in Woodstock NY (1972-1984). The symposium at Columbia University’s Center for Jazz Studies (directed by trombonist and digital music innovator George E. Lewis, once a CMS student/participant) last weekend dipped into the history and practices of the CMS, a paradise where cross-genre visionary improvisers (Don Cherry, Anthony Braxton, Cecil Taylor, Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette, et al), composer/interpreters (Pauline Oliveros, Frederic Rzewski) and “world music” fusionists (Olatunji, Nana Vasconcelos) taught through oral transmission in an immersion setting.

Back in the day I wished I was musician enough to attend the Woodstock sessions, and as a budding writer was frustrated there was nowhere comparable to go — so moderating a symposium panel felt like I got to CMS at last.

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Vionlinist Billy Bang on being a “tunnel rat” in Viet Nam

Violinist Billy Bang, died at age 63 on April 11 of cancer, was a composer of enduring, affecting music based on his military service in Viet Nam. Prayer for Peace, Vietnam: Reflections and Vietnam: The Aftermath deal directly, bravely and beautifully with Bang’s thoughts and feelings about having been a tunnel rat — a small soldier dropped into darkness to sniff out what, or who, was a danger underground. Go to my NPR interview with Billy and click “listen.”Â

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Central Brooklyn Jazz Fest reiterates jazz/race divide

The Central Brooklyn Jazz Festival, during what the Smithsonian Institution promotes asÂ Jazz Appreciation Month, is a powerful statement of hard core, grass-roots support for the music Congress has ratified as “a rare and valuable American national treasure.”Â My City Arts column reports on how the fest and other Brooklyn jazz activities, despite best intentions, reprise the distances and suspicions people of diverse backgrounds hold about each other.

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Subotnick, Lillevan, Unsound make Lincoln Center an electric circus

MortonÂ Subotnick re-mixes original materials of his prophetic and unprecedented late ’60s Â electronic music classic “Silver Apples of the Moon” with kinetic imagery by video artistÂ LillevanÂ tonight (April 7)Â at the Rubenstein atrium of Lincoln Center –Â as detailed in myÂ columnÂ in City Arts – New York. It’s free as part of the 11-dayÂ Unsound Festival,Â an extraordinary schedule of new and unusual multi-media works presented by theÂ Fundcja Tone of Krakow with theÂ Polish Cultural Institute in New YorkÂ and theÂ Goethe-Institute New York. Subotnick performs again tomorrow (April 8) at Greenwich House Music School (also NYC), 6 pm.

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Jazz, blues & beyond in Amman: Pops, Bird, Diz, Lady Day @ UJordan

I spoke on jazz and blues at the University of Jordan, a modern 45,000-student institution, in an event sponsored by the American Embassy while in Amman on family matters a couple weeks ago. About 50 avid students of music, arts and literature and their informed faculty watched videos of Louis Armstrong at age 32 doing “Dinah,”Â Charlie Parker & Dizzy Gillespie playing “Hot House,”Â Billie Holiday with all-stars singing “Fine and Mellow”Â and Muddy Waters among other immortals from the American Folk Blues Festival, 1962-69, vol. 3.Â I talked about blues and jazz being one in essence, but different in practice. Then second-year Jordanian student Nabil Gonzalez played banjo, harmonic and sang two original numbers in a U.S. folkie style. “I’m passionately in love with bluegrass music!” Gonzalez told me. Other of the young people were eager for jazz and blues, but said they had little access to the music or information about it.

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Beyond jazz, in and to Jordan

Jordan’s capitol Amman isn’t an obvious hot spot for jazz, yet I found interest, knowledge and exciting players during my visit there a couple weeks ago — from which I’m barely recovered. A couple of postings and I hope a video of bass guitarist Yacoub Abu Ghosh‘s band from its weekly Tuesday night gig at Canvas will follow. For now my video on Petra, my brother and sis-in-law as guides to an ancient city carved from rosy mountain rock, where taxes on caravans coming through their pass supported a culture of some 50,000 people, at home in caves.

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UNsafe concert: Threadgill, La Barbara, ACO dare to fail

“Playing It UNsafe” is how the American Composers Orchestra characterizes tonight’s concert of works by Henry Threadgill, Joan La Barbara, Sean Friar and Laura Schwendinger at Zankel Hall, NYC. Afraid of classical musicians improvising? Multi-layered “sound paintings” of multi-tracked voice, electronic ambiance and instrumentalists sitting in the audience? Symphonic and light collaborations? Then walk on the wild side — or at least watch the fine videos by Jeremy Robins — like the two of Threadgill explaining his ACO-sponsored research and development project, below —

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President Obama digs Sonny Rollins

President Barack Obama paid beautiful lip service to great American artists and arts yesterday, conferring the 2010 National Medal of Arts and Humanities on heroes including Sonny Rollins, age 80. “I speak personally here,” said the president at 3 minutes, 30 seconds into his address, alluding to authors, poets, historians, “because there are people here whose works shaped me. I’ve got these thumbworn editions of these works of arts, and these old records from when they were still vinyl, Sonny, before they went digital, that helped inspire me, or get me through a tough day, or take risks that I might not otherwise have taken, and I think what’s true for me is true for everyone here and true for our country.” Amen to that. Sonny takes his bows at minute 16, after Quincy Jones, before James Taylor.

But the House of Representatives disagrees, cutting the entire $40 million Arts in Education program of the U.S. Department of Education on the heels of cutting the National Endowment for the Arts budget by 26%, largest slashing in 16 years.

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Toxic Gowanus, Brooklyn neighb of new music lofts

Gowanus, a Brooklyn neighborhood so unlovely it’s been named an EPA superfund site, is Ground Zero now for music lofts, as reported in my new City Arts-New York column. In a half dozen or so artist-run spaces — including IBeam, Douglas Street Collective, Littlefield, the Brooklyn Lyceum and Issue Project Room — available for presentation and rehearsal of hard-core experimental sounds, dance, video and performance art, the programming is typically spiky, ambitious and unsentimental.

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NEA ends Jazz, Folk, Opera awards for “full range of American artists”

National Endowment for the Arts’ FY-12 budget eliminates a 30-year-old Jazz Masters Awards program, and special recognition with National Heritage Fellowships and Opera honors, in favor of Artist of the Year Awards available for the entire spectrum of performing artists (all forms of music and theater as one). Here’s the NEA’s statement, issued through a spokesperson, regarding its “modification of honorifics,” in response to some issues I alluded to yesterday, which seem sure to reverberate with diverse effects throughout the U.S.’s far-flung and various jazz communities.

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NEA wants to end Jazz Masters program

The National Endowment of the Arts’ FY-12 Appropriations Request has just been posted, and cuts $21 million to return to its 2008 funding level. Among program “modifications”: the establishment of “American Artists of the Year awards,” which will “remove specific reference to Jazz, Folk, and Opera” and give discipline awards annually in two categories:

Performing Arts: Dance/Music/Opera/Musical Theater/Theater
Visual Arts: Design/Media Arts/Museums/Visual Arts (including crafts)

This evidently means the end of the Jazz Masters Fellowships, which have been conferred upon 123 people since it began in 1982. Jazz Masters have also been documented by the Smithsonian Institution’s Oral History Project, and have received tour support for live performances.

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Esperanza who? Grammy’s Best New Artist (and more)

Best New Artist of the Year, according to the Grammys, is Esperanza Spalding, a 26-year-old jazz bassist and singer whose most recent album is titled Chamber Music Society. What!? or should the question be, How?! Full congrats, she’s as bright a rising star as has emerged from jazz by virtue of her charm and chops since 2006 — when Junjo, her first CD, was released. She beat out some kid named Justin Bieber, whose fans are enraged.

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Black History Month Post-?-Racial String Bands

The Carolina Chocolate Drops are at least as entertaining as the 19th minstrel shows they cop songs and style from — and just as confounding to any strict analysis of American attitudes about what’s called “race” — as noted in my new column in City Arts – New York.

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