Archives for 2012

I didn’t know Terry Riley could perform A Rainbow in Curved Air live, as he did last Friday with his guitarist son Gyan at the Skirbal Center for the Performing Arts on NYU’s campus, as part of an appearance by the Joshua Light Show. But yes he can, and masterfully — as if he just thought it up.

Unlike any other piece of electronic music I’ve heard (including “Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band,” which was side two of the 1969 Columbia lp on which “Rainbow” was introduced to the world) and any other 20-21st century chamber music I can think of (including Riley’s composition “In C,” or anything by the generation of composers with whom he’s identified), this work has a sprightliness as well as a glistening, otherworldly quality. It’s too easy to write that Riley, now 77, has the long beard, ready grin and twinkle in his eye that made him look onstage like a leprechaun gamboling in the morning dew, or that the music sounds like magic.

The original recording credited the composer with playing electric organ, electric harpsichord, rocksichord, dumbec and tambourine; at Skirball he did everything for several different pieces, including a jokey one like a soundtrack for a chase scene made up of prototypical “synthesizer sounds,” on one keyboard. For all I know there are presets or loops he triggers that do the work. But he and Gyan, whose created his figures on electric guitar in close connection but free contrast to his dad’s, were much more spontaneous in a jazzy way than I’d anticipated. The elder Riley’s finger work on grand piano was also surprisingly articulate, precise, playful yet symmetrical. Someone uploaded on YouTube a few seconds on the concert — unauthorized. of course, and of low sound quality, but here it is:

Riley studied with the late Hindustani classical singer Pandit Pran Nath, so it is tempting to think of “Rainbow” as an electronic raga, but it is not that. Nor are his published or recorded efforts going to be thought of by anyone as “jazz,” though he has frequently cited his admiration for jazz icons from Art Tatum and Bud Powell through Mingus, Miles and Coltrane. “A Rainbow in Curved Air,” however, not only can be played live, it can be opened up and improvised on, as in the nearly 30-minute version from 2007 posted at Riley’s website (which seems to me to open with a quote George Harrison’s “Within You and Without You.” Riley is quite a Beatles fan). There have been several notable American composers generally respected as “legitimate” who’ve been deeply influenced and/or active in jazz — Gershwin, of course, but also Copland, Mel Powell, Milton Babbitt and of Riley’s historic circle, LaMont Young, Steve Reich and Morton Subotnick, for starters. But  they rarely if ever have included significant improvisation into their structured pieces, as Riley has.

About the Joshua Light Show — yes, it was spectacular eye candy. Unusually colorful, evolving in a slow, deliberate but unpredictable way that was entrancing, the images moved with their own rhythm, which I felt didn’t especially reflect the music or refer to anything outside their specific and specialized ken. My intrepid companion makes a good case, though, for the visual artistry and processes consciously manipulated by the Light Show crew being much more than that: multilayered, narrative in concept, applying distinct skills and background experience in painting and stagecraft, highly collaborative. Here’s what the JSL looked like in collaboration with Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWingarden from MGMT, the night before its appearance with the Rileys (and a second show with John Zorn, Bill Laswell, Milford Graves and Lou Reed).

I could only think of what Joshua and his highly trained associates concocted as akin to what I saw at Chicago’s Electric Circus/Kinetic Playground way back when, and rather anachronistic, in light of what visual technology is available today. Plus, the beautiful but conventional Skirball theater is not the kind of free-floating environment that gave lights shows of the psychedelic ’60s and ’70s the important position of being ambiance-setters. And I was rather more absorbed in the music than the visuals. But I hope there are music-and-lights shows happening now which continue in the maximal immersion mode of the ’60s, drawing on the efforts of Joshua and Riley, both.

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Low ad revenue for CityArts-New York has brought an end to the twice-monthly column on jazz and related music I’ve written since its first issue in March 2009.

Indeed, CityArts, originally trumpeted as “New York’s review of culture”  and under film critic Armond White’s editorship heralded as “Bringing thinking back to the arts,” has been significant downsized. Rather than publishing as a free, free-standing slick-covered oversized-tabloid 20 times a year, it will continue as an insert in publisher Manhattan Media’s other newspapers, with a banner reading “CityArts” over a special feature each week. The website and archives remain accessible, too. I’ve been invited to suggest story ideas, but advised that my contributions would be compensated at “a much reduced fee.” Since CityArts payments were fair but at essentially the same level as I was paid by the Village Voice starting in 1982, a much-reduced fee” isn’t much of a motivation, although I very much enjoy having a local outlet for my writings on the local scene.

Since my first journalistic job, at the Chicago Daily News, ended with the death in 1978 of that highly regarded metropolitan daily, I’ve learned to take publications’ closings in stride. It’s unfortunate for readers, writers, publishers and advertisers, too, to lose a platform for the exchange of information, but we’re living through a media revolution and the shakeout continues, with no current survivors guaranteed that their efforts will endure.

I myself continue, writing for this blog and for other publications on a per-assignment basis until a better offer comes along. I’m also writing liner notes (right now for a powerful cd by violinist Christian Howes with accordionist Richard Galliano, pianist Josh Nelson, bassist Scott Colley and drummer Lewis Nash, and a live improvised concert by drummer Klaus Kugel with pianist Roberta Piket, reeds player Roby Glod and bassist Mark Tokar), brief bits for JJANews.org, teaching “Writing about the Arts” and “Roots of American Music” at New York University, producing an arts segment on Morton Subotnick for National Public Radio. So readers — don’t despair! Keep an eye on this space and I’ll tell you where else to find my journalism: Currently, in the September issue of DownBeat (article about James Blood Ulmer and the David Murray Blues Big Band), the Ukranian magazine Counterpoint and in the music issue of The Rake (for which I wrote about John Coltrane-Johnny Hartman, a classic that is now 50 years old). Maybe a book in the not-so-distant future, too. . . .Of course, if a publication seeks a jazz columnist, my services are available.

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Being in Chicago during the week pre-Labor Day for the City’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE)-produced, Jazz Institute of Chi-programmed Jazz Festival has been my annual habit — a good one. My hometown continues to reward broad and deep musical listening: A far-South Side “send-off” for newly departed NEA Jazz Master saxophonist Von Freeman, a city-wide jazz club tour, and the last day of three multi-stage extravaganzas downtown filled with local heroes, headlined by artist-in-resident Ken Vandermark, native son Steve Coleman, Danish guitarist-composer Pierre Dørge’s New Jungle Orchestra and New Orleans songwriter Allen Toussaint’s The Bright Mississippi show provided  a partial overview of what’s happening now.

I must mention, too, my transfer of a second batch of professional papers including ms., transcripts,

clippings and publications to the growing and accessible Chicago Jazz Archives in the Special Collections Research Center of the University of Chicago Library. That is an attempt to look forward, as I do not expect a memorial as public and community-endorsed as Freeman’s was. The turnout, about 600 people at the impressive Christ Universal Temple, included musicians who had worked with Von and those who had sat in with or were simply influenced by him, his son Chico, Dave Jemilo who runs the Green Mill, and his surviving brother George, a guitarist who sustains the Freeman family values of originality, generous collaboration and commitment to the Second City. Performances of identifiably South Side repertoire ranging from the bluesy songs of the hard-bop ’50s through the exploratory horns of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) alternated with emotional tributes to an 88-year-old whose sound and spirit live on.

Vonsky-like commitment is the sine qua non of the Jazz Institute, a grass roots membership organization which has guided the artistic direction of the Chi Jazz Fest  for 34 years. With no profit motive or philanthropic endowment, the JIC works with limited funds from the City, the corporate Chicago Jazz Partnership, and a dozen sponsors including the brewery Stella Artois, Pepsi, Aquafina, the Gallo Family Vineyards, the Chicago Tribune, radio station WGN, Chicago Jazz Magazine and DownBeat. The fest presents local musicians mostly in downtown outdoor settings including the Gehry-designed Pritzker Pavilion, temporary stages put up near Buckingham Fountain and the long-lasting Petrillo Bandshell, where the projected sound is considerably better than it’s complained about by Chi Trib jazz crit Howard Reich, who I think consistently confuses city’s fests apples and oranges, overlooks the participation of Chicago’s neighborhood clubs and doesn’t appreciate the unique realities reflected in this urb’s summer’s end celebration.

Prior to the Fest proper, I drove to venues from South 83rd St.’s City Life (many club tour attendees take the innovative fest-contracted trolley’s), where I again enjoyed undiscovered veteran singer June Yvon and her cool backup group, Room 43 where the Hyde Park Jazz Society holds weekly Sunday sessions; biting alto saxist Ernest Dawkins, with drummer Isaiah Spencer, who’s moving to NYC next spring, the South Side Arts Center where fast-emerging drummer Taylor Moore charmed with every broad smile and hard hit; and Joe Segal’s Jazz Showcase, where Chi multi-instrumentalist in Florida exile Ira Sullivan held forth.

In the park itself, roaring reedist Vandermark, who is a MacArthur Award winner but never has never before had a four-day artistic residency, led a couple of different ensembles; I heard his very daring electro-acoustic Made to Break quartet with synthesist Christof Kurzmann, an Austrian who resides in Argentina. Alto saxist/arranger/composer Jeff Newell was born in Nebraska and lives now in NYC, but had some years in Chicago, and led a performance of his New Trad Octet that

began with a hiply modernized version of “Struttin’ with Some Barbeque.” I could have done without unabashed pop singer Sarah Marie Young (she played tenor ukelele when no stomping and shimmying), but the Dørge Orchestra’s set was outside/inside like the best jazz, dipping into Ellington’s “Black and Tan Fantasy” and “Caravan” as well as introducing funny, gutsy originals from its latest cd, Sketches of India. They knew how to win over audience engagement, too, wiggling their fingers, leading syncopated hand-clapping and call-and-response shout-outs in Danish, then blowing their individual butts off.

Altoist Steve Coleman, a native Chicagoan mentored by Von Freeman, was even stronger, relentlessly turning cellular phrases through myriad variations — Finlayson matched Coleman’s challenging virtuosity with his own. Subsequently, Allen Toussaint was something of a comedown. Responsible for more than half the most memorable songs from New Orleans since the late ’50s — “Working in a Coal Mine,” “Yes We Can-Can,” “Voulez-vous Coucher Avec Moi,” “Java” and others written for Lee Dorsey, the Pointer Sisters, LaBelle, Al Hirt, the Dixie Cups, Meters and Neville Brothers — he flashed finesse but not much funk. Don Byron on clarinet took many chances soloing on chestnuts including “St. james Infirmary,” “A Closer Walk with Thee,” and Monk’s “Bright Mississippi” — Byron and Ribot brought the entire audience, estimated at 8 to 10,000, to a hush with Ellington’s “Solitude.” I liked this on record, but live the classicism was too laid back for a fest finale. Toussaint’s improvised piano interlude roamed through many hoary themes without spending near enough time on Professor Longhair’s rhumba-boogie.  One wag scoffed a Toussaint song with a paraphrase: “Everything I do gohn be corny from now on.”

Perhaps corn should be expected in late summer in Illinois. And there was no indication the terrifically heterogeneous audience minded sweet jazz  (the Roaring ’20s version of “smooth”) mixed with the hot. There is little to dislike, after all, about a holiday weekend of free music that appeals to the ears, minds and physical responses of so many citizens in a large and diverse metropolis. Chicago is not alone in putting on this kind of celebration of America’s indigenous musical culture — Detroit held a rival free fest last weekend, and like Chicago spotlit locals, high school and college student big bands included. But Chicago should be proud. It continues to nurture local stalwarts such as Willie Pickens, Stu Katz, Ken Cheney, Frank D’Rone and Erwin Helfer, while  continuing to turn out top level talent like alto saxist Greg Ward, drummer Mike Reed, vibist Jason Adasiewicz, trumpeter Marquis Hill, keyboardist Greg Spero, Yoko Noge and Dee Alexander, pianist Edwin Sanchez, saxophonist Caroline Davis, singer Milton Suggs. The city has a jazz feeling of its own that suffuses (as the Art Ensemble of Chicago might say) all its sounds from the ancient to the future. A lot of it swings, and much of it soars. Plus, there’s the Lake. I’m glad I grew up there.

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The immortal Charlie Parker — the dazzling alto saxophonist who helped raise jazz to an abstract art form and embodied “hip” as a person experienced, perceptive, hedonistic, aware of the contradictions — would have dug the 20th anniversary Charlie Parker Jazz Festival held in Marcus Garvey Park, Harlem, Manhattan, New York City yesterday. His old buddy Roy Haynes, now 87 (Bird died age 35 in 1955), wearing a sharp cut, creamy white satin (?)  suit, tap-danced, jested and flirted with the audience, but best of all played trap drums deftly and dramatically in solo and accompaniment of his fervent young quartet.

Couples danced — for real, close and meaning it, with some of surviving original Lindy Hoppers undeterred by Haynes’ off-kilter yet always in-tempo drumalog. Listeners soaked up Haynes and his Fountain of Youth band  — impassioned altoist Jaleel Shaw, imaginative pianist Martin Bejarano, flexible bassist David Wong — playing Monk (I think it was “Jackie-ing”), Metheny (“James”), “Autumn in New York,” a Bird melody, another ballad. . . Nothing rote. I’m lucky — get to hear them again Friday night at the Chicago Jazz Festival.

Though Haynes is originally from Roxbury in Boston, the pleasant bandshell at Marcus Garvey Park was full of his real hometown crowd: Lifelong jazz devotees, sophisticated urbanites, the majority African-Americans, and about 3/4s, I’d guess, ages 45 and up.

Not that we’re the last of the breed. Relative youngsters onstage included electric bassist Derrick Hodge with trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and a tight, hard-syncopating drummer (sorry, missed his name — maybe Chris Daves?); underwhelming though loud drummer Jamire Williams, whose band Erimaj was vastly improved when pianist Jason Moran sat in on Fender Rhodes, offering a lesson to band pianist Kris Bowers, for a tune; and singer Rene Marie’s response give with the excellent, underplaying drummer Quentin Baxter.

As there are rising players in their 20s, there are jazz journalists of that age (I saw reporter/blogger Matt Kassel, writer/blogger/ethnomusicologist Alex Rodriguez, Gio Russonello of the D.C. website Capital Bop and Emilie Pons, as well as Jazz Times’ publisher Lee Mergener, Laurence Donohue-Greene of the New York City Jazz Record and Jo Ann Cheatham (publisher Pure Jazz Magazine, Brooklyn), and at least some of the presenters are young (Mehgan Stabile of Revive Music Group collaborated on this CP fest with the City Parks Foundation, which also produces Summerstage). So where are the Gen Next fans?

I’ll give Rene Marie high marks for insisting in “This For Joe” that she not be compared to “Ella or Sarah, magnolia’s don’t stay in this hair/That was then, this is now/I’m right here, they’re somewhere up there . . . ” but I take a couple away for her dis (in the same song? Not as recorded) of critics, asking what kind of preparation they’ve done, how many of us have been onstage — as if actually performing is the necessary background to understanding some expanse of the jazz world, then writing or broadcasting or photographing or videographing or all of that informed and well-disseminated news of new and older artists, trends in music and its changing landscape. Sadly, the CP fest audience jeered at the crits right along with Marie (whose received a lot of good reviews, deservedly), which made it slightly uncomfortable for me to go up to the mike thereafter and present Roy Haynes with his seventh Drummer of the Year Award from the Jazz Journalists Association, of which I’m president.

I didn’t take the the slingsshots too seriously and neither did anyone else. No tomatoes were thrown. Someone even asked for me business card, admitting to be a jazz blogger. “Yes, that counts!” I told him. Seemed like most everyone knew I was there to enjoy jazz  in the moment, as Charlie Parker intended, and would put out the good word, my preferred sort of coverage.

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The NYC Charlie Parker Jazz Festival began 20 years ago and returns starting Aug. 17 with a week of activities leading up to free concerts Aug. 24 – 36 in Marcus Garvey Park, Harlem, and Tompkins Square Park, East Village. I will present headliner Roy Haynes with his “Drummer of the Year” Award from the Jazz Journalists Association on Aug. 25, and am hosting a Sidetours group to enjoy the fest experience from an insider’s point of view (mine). Haynes is one of the handful of surviving jazz veterans who made music with Bird in his heyday, and his performance with his Fountain of Youth Band can be reliably predicted to take flight — the drummer is still very much at the top of his game, incredibly at age 87.

A couple of spots in this small group are still open, so if you’re interested, sign up soon, as I’m pretty excited to be hanging out with a curious coterie of cool folks via Sidetours, looking forward to meeting new people and talking music with them, as I do with my friends and also students in my NYU classes.

The Charlie Parker fest was initiated by a small neighborhood committee comprising photographer Judy Sneed, who lived in the East Village apartment where  the great jazz alto saxophonist resided with his family when he died in 1955, and Sam Turvey, a local activist, among others. Over the past two decades the fest has presented many musical thrills. I remember alto saxophonist Charles McPherson, tenorist Archie Shepp, Butch Morris leading a conduction of many flutists backing altoist Arthur Blythe, pianist Vijay Iyer, singer Etta Jones’ singing the Billie Holiday songbook and altoist Marty Ehrlich leading the Julius Hemphill Sextet among highlights of the beautiful late summer days in the parks. Last year, when the fest was rained out, I created an online virtual video fest of the bands that had been booked.

After funding problems led the fest founders to suspend activities about eight years ago, NYC’s City Parks department took over the responsibilities, and the people who bring us Central Park Summerstage have done a bang-up job honoring the inimitably bluesy and fleet Bird, extending festivities to a second site on a second day (and now a whole week), besides maintaining the high level of jazz talent. This year, besides Haynes the fest at Garvey presents singer Rene Marie’s “Experiment in Truth” (a very candid program, based on material she recorded in 2007 and has just issued as a DIY production),  bassist Derrick Hodge (currently touring with pianist Robert Glasper, he has a Blue Note record release upcoming) and Erimaj (Jamire Williams) who promises a genre mashup, plus two poets. The night before (Aug. 24),  producer-composer-arranger-strings specialist Miguel Atwood Ferguson presents his ambitious “Bird with Strings” program by  at Garvey, and on Sunday at Tompkins Square Park the singers Ernestine Anderson and Gregory Porter perform with their respective bands, keyboardist Andy Milne’s Dapp Theory, and emerging pianist Sullivan Fortner rounding out the bill.

If you’ve heard of Bird but haven’t heard him, take a look at this 1952 video of the Immortal with trumpeter

Dizzy Gillespie, his most worthy collaborator, pianist Dick Hyman, bassist Sandy Block and left-handed drummer Charlie Smith playing “Hot House.” Virtuosic, gutsy, succinct, brilliant, Charlie Parker was an innovator poised historically between Louis Armstrong and Jimi Hendrix. We’re always listening for someone new of that order.

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The 58th anniversary of the Newport Jazz Festival starts tonight (Friday, 8/3) in Rhode Island, and thanks to producer George Wein, there’s a press bus going that I’ll be on. But you don’t have to go to Newport for the jazz fest experience — small towns as well as large ones throughout America (and beyond) have discovered that jazz fests are good, clean fun, fine for the local economy and for giving a town a good name, too. (Tip: you can watch the Newport Jazz Fest’s Saturday and Sunday shows as broadcast live by a partnership of WGBH and WBGO — how ironic! – which will be archived as audio, reportedly).

Peekskill’s 6th annual Jazz and Blues Fest, for instance, two weekends ago, was a day-trip from Manhattan and an easy pleasure. An hour and a half on Metro North from Grand Central Station, which cost about $50 apiece rt, and my friend and I alit into a low-key town on the Hudson. A mile walk uphill to Peekskill center, where the streets were blocked off for pedestrians only, a stage was set so the sun would sink behind it. Rows of folding chair awaited sitters. The restaurants were all open, with either seating or grills or steam tables out front. Each had booked jazz performancers: I heard singer Alexis Cole with pianist Richard Sussman while lunching. A local flutist sat in nicely on a bossa nova.

Officially that fest’s music didn’t start ’til 4, so we shopped at the used book store (of course) and poked into a couple shops. Then Nation Beat came on. An energetic NYC-based Brazil cum New Orleans ensemble led by

drummer Scott Kettner, it is by no means a purist jazz ensemble, and no one cares. Singer Liliana and the fiddler-clarinetist soloist loosened up the crowd, so little kids and parents were comfortable dancing in front of them, and the foldings chair filled up (though mostly the shaded ones first).

Pianist Marc Cary’s Focus Trio followed — and though he had only a Fender to work with, no grand piano, Cary was inspired by the crowd’s good energy and afternoon’s mellow vibe to play a long, propulsive theme–to-theme jam with his bassist Rashaan Carter and drummer Sameer Gupta, the only person I’ve ever seen deal with his  tabla simultaneously with his traps. Alto saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin, with her very loud r&b party band, took over as dusk fell. We copped some excellent jerk chicken with sides, ate sitting on a street stoop, and headed home exhausted, missing (sadly) headliner Bobby Sanabria, whose Latin jazz band Ascensión with trombonist Chris Washburne, amongst others, was sure to be a blowout finalé.

I estimate the crowd was about 2000. The Peekskill Business Improvement District (BID) is the presenter of the festival, with sponsors including D. Bertoline & Sons (which appears to be an Anheuser-Busch distributor), Verizon, Wells Fargo and Wheelabator Westchester LP, “a waste management company,” with in-kind help from the City of Peekskill, the Hudson Valley Gateway Chamber of Commerce, and the Paramount Center for the Arts, a local presenter based in a restored movie palace.

Just from notifications in my e-mail I know that this weekend is also Chicago South Shore Jazz Festival (featuring Pharoah Sanders and local star singer Dee Alexander; next weekend (Aug 10 – 12) is the Litchfield Jazz Festival; Aug 8 – 12 is the New Haven Jazz Festival, and the third annual Bancroft and Maynooth Jazz and Blues festival in Bancroft, Ontario (thanks to saxist-flutist Jane Bunnett and trumpeter Larry Cramer, producers); Aug 16 through 19 is the Hudson Valley Jazz Festival in Warwick, NY; Aug 18 and 19 there’s a Jazz on 2nd Avenue Festival in Niwot, Colorado, and Poughkeepsie’s “Jazz in the Valley Weekend” and Morristown NJ’s Jazz and Blues Festival.

Also: Chene Park in Detroit has just begun its Wednesday evening series (leading up to the Detroit International Jazz Festival over Labor Day — at which time I’ll be at the Chicago Jazz Festival). The Jazz Journalists Association just presented Jazz Awards, belatedly, to Amiri Baraka (for Lifetime Achievement in Jazz Journalism) at the Lincoln Park Music Festival in Newark, NJ, and to Gretchen Parlato (as Best Female Singer of the Year) at the Caramoor Jazz Festival in Katonah, New York.

And so on. There must be something productive about jazz festivals, or this wouldn’t be happening.

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AJ Silver is a cowboy from The Bronx, and his lasso act opening “Travesties of 2012,” a vaudeville cavalcade curated by Trav SD at the New York Music Theatre Festival brought out the grinning 3rd grader in me. Not a bad thing — it’s quite the pleasure to see a 14 foot hank of rope spinning like a tornado overhead when you’re sitting in a small black-box on the third floor of a Manhattan off-Broadway multi-stage venue. Yippi-ki-yo-ki-yay!

But “Travesties,” which runs tonight (Sat., July 21) and next Thurs. through Sat. at the 45th Street Theater as one of more than 100 shows produced by the NYMTF through July 29, features more than just lariats. There was an eerie contortionist, a scary-clown horror-story-teller, chanteuses ranging from the subversive to the glamorous, a tap dancer, a rhyming sketch the likes of which were common groaners about a hundred years ago, rousing songs by the assembled company and an aura of silliness that’s hard to beat. As Trav SD— aka Travis

Stewart, author of the definitive yet delightful history of American vaudeville No Applause, Just Throw Money, in a white suit, safari hat and greasepaint Groucho mustache — explains from the start, theater has plots, burlesque has ecdysiasts, vaudeville has it all.

The cast of  “Travesties of 2012″ changes a bit, nightly. I was hoping to see the mentalist, but was amused by mock$tar Killy Dwyer (named among the ‘Top 10 Women Who Rock Comedy” by FunnyNotSlutty.com), chilled by Dandy Darkly, rather charmed by Meghan “Big Red” Murphy who probably does her material with a bit less wink-in-her-eyes in regular cabaret performances. Oh well, I will return next time Trav SD puts on a review, hoping to see a mentalist. That’s the thing about entertainment, you keep coming back for more.

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Last January during the NEA Jazz Masters ceremonies at Lincoln Center, I blogged “Who should  the next NEA Jazz Masters be?” and wrote, “My own list of deserving nominees — it starts with Eddie Palmieri.” Today the NEA announced  its  Jazz Masters of 2013 — Eddie Palmieri! — pianist-composer-arranger-bandleader and spokesman known as the Sun of Latin Music. Plus bluesy singer-songwriter-pianist Mose Allison, veteran soul/bebop alto saxophonist Lou Donaldson and Lorraine Gordon, doyenne of the Village Vanguard.

Nice list, though a shorter one. Last year there five. But we shouldn’t be greedy. There were only three Jazz Masters named every year from 1982, when the program was established, to 2004, when Dana Gioia had taken over as NEA Chairman, the position now held by Rocco Landesman.

Palmieri, Allison, Donaldson and Gordon become welcome honorees in a program that in 2012 the Endowment planned to end. The House of Representatives, in a rare example of do-goodness, saved it. The budget may not be what it was, there are fewer JMs this year than in the recent past, but in this case it’s the thought that counts, first and foremost. Better a slimmed down Jazz Masters than no Jazz Masters. And good thinking: The class of honorees cuts across the spectrum of what jazz means as contemporary American music that engages with art and entertainment, too.

I think of Allison as in the sophisticated southern folk/modern hipster tradition, closer to Johnny Mercer and Hoagy Carmichael than Fats Domino or Allen Toussaint, but nothing wrong with that. In the ’60s he popularized Willie Dixon/Muddy Water’s “Seventh Son,” but his originality extends to vocal-jazz proponents like Ben Sidran, Randy Newman, Gil (yes) Scott-Heron, Curtis Stigers, maybe Bobby McFerrin.

Donaldson is famously opinionated about music that does not hew to the principles of the music he hews to — blues and bebop, babies, grits and gravy! But as a 60-year-road warrior, the real deal who can still dependably blow even in the toughest of houses down, he’s earned  the right to his views and puts them to practice for obvious audience satisfaction. Young musicians look up to him, and he brings them along.

Lorraine Gordon’s influence on jazz certainly predates her taking over the Village Vanguard upon the 1989 death of her husband Max Gordon, who founded it in 1935. Perhaps her hand can be traced as far back as during her marriage to Blue Note Records founder Alfred Lion. She’s been a fan and a tastemaker, curator and canonizer, and has stories from  deep on the inside to tell about what has happened in jazz. It’s good we remember that jazz has operated as part of a business ecology for some 100 years now, and without entrepreneurs who keep all their skin in the game it is most unlikely to last.

Typically, an oral history of the Jazz Master is part of the NEA treatment, along with a relatively modest yet-no-one-turns-it-down $25,000 honorarium, and some sort of to-doings next January, in collaboration with Jazz at Lincoln Center and usually also BMI, among other sponsors.

Benefits of being a Jazz Master also include potential tour support, and production of a brief video biography. There have been 142 previously named NEA Jazz Masters, and nominations are open for anyone, now,  to make their recommendation of Jazz Masters to be honored in 2014.

I have to think long and hard on this. You can only make one nomination. The responsibility is great. Last year I pushed Eddie Palmieri, who’s music I get off on, live or on cd — check out his ’60s work with Cal Tjader, his impossibly exciting Live at Sing Sing with Harlem River Drive, tragically out-of-print Lucumi-Macumba-Voodoo, his super-tight jazz from 1994 Palmas, La Perfecta II from 2002. . .Who lives up to that, in my listening, who hasn’t already been recognized as a master? Who must the NEA name Jazz Master of 2014? Hmmmmm. . .. . .

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