Here's writing I worked hard on last year, published in slightly different form as a "Global Ear" column in The Wire (UK) December 2019. Rafael Arriaga's photos (unless credited otherwise) are a fit complement, as is Jazzamoart's painting, "El Bop de los Alebrijes." El Bop de los Alebrijes, © Jazzamoart The Harmonipan players, khaki-uniformed men and women grinding away for spare change on out-of-tune, ill-repaired 100-year-old portable German organs in the midst of Mexico City's car-jammed boulevards, were the most surprising element … [Read more...]
Chicago Jazz fest images, echoes
Roscoe Mitchell onscreen, presiding over The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Pritzker Pavillion Millennium Park Chicago, 8/30/19photo (c) Marc PoKempner The 41st annual Chicago Jazz Festival has come and gone, as I reported for DownBeat.com in quick turnaround. I stand by my lead that the music was epic -- cf. Marc PoKempner's beautiful image of the Art Ensemble of Chicago at Pritzker Pavillion, facing east towards Mecca just before their African percussion-driven orchestral set. And epochal, yes: the Art Ensemble is 50 years old, as discussed … [Read more...]
Transcending Toxic Times with street poetry & music
My DownBeat article about Transcending Toxic Times, the compulsively listenable, critically political album by the Last Poets produced by electric bassist/composer Jamaaladeen Tacuma, includes a lot of quotes from my interviews with him and poet Abiudon Oyewale. from left: Baba Donn Babatunde, Jamaaaladeen Tacuma (in front), Umar Bin Hassan, Abiodun Oyewole I reproduced some of the searing imagery/lyrics on the recording, and provided background on how these men have been calling out American mendacy and hypocrity for half-a-century, as … [Read more...]
Dr. John, Back in the Day and Blindfolded
Dr. John the Night Tripper -- Mac Rebbanack, New Orleans' musical fabulist, dead June 6 at age 77 -- dazzled me at one of the first rock shows I recall attending, at Chicago's Aragon Ballroom circa 1969. Dr. John, Vienna 2011, photo by Sánta István Csaba I was then enthralled by Gris-gris, his murky, obscure and carnivalesque debut album, having never heard anything like it (and I still haven't -- thanks perhaps to the great, less- heralded producer Harold Battiste). I was thrilled to Blindfold Test Mac for DownBeat in 1984. He came … [Read more...]
Black Chicago music fest producers: The costs of “free”
Chicago offers, surprisingly enough, many opportunities to catch exciting, accomplished and emerging music across genres, with oodles of concerts free of charge, meaning they have to funded by others than attendees. Our extraordinary summer events season launched last weekend with the city-sponsored, all-free 34th Annual Chicago Gospel Festival in Millennium Park and I'm psyched for the 36th Annual Chicago Blues Festival next weekend (planning to somehow dart off to the Printers Row Lit Fest, simultaneously at the opposite end of the Loop) as … [Read more...]
Digging Our Roots videos, speakers inspire engagement
Billy Branch watches Sonny Boy (Rice Miller) Williamson II; photo by Alan Frolichstein Nearly 100 Chicagoans (maybe some visitors?) watched Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Junior Wells, Buddy Guy and other heroes of the blues on videos at the Cultural Center Thursday night (5/23/19), with harmonica star Billy Branch and WDCB program host Leslie Keros telling stories and participated in lively interplay with knowing attendees. It was the fifth Digging Our Roots: Chicago's Greatest Hits "listening session" this spring, co-presented by the Jazz … [Read more...]
Guitarist Kenny Burrell shouldn’t be in trouble. But he is.
Guitarist Kenny Burrell -- since the 1950s a prominent, popular and influential jazz innovator, recording ace, bandleader and esteemed educator (prof and director of Jazz Studies at UCLA) -- at age 87 is suffering grievous financial calamity due to health care costs and multiple frauds. His plight is candidly detailed by his wife Katherine at their GoFundMe campaign site, her story verified by The Jazz Foundation of America in its statement supporting the Burrells posted by JazzTimes magazine. Read that, then kick in, please, and demand to know … [Read more...]
Audio-video jazz improv: Mn’Jam Experiment, w/teens
What's really new in improvisational music? Where else can innovation go? Mn'JAM Experiment -- singer Melissa Oliveira and her visual/electronics/turntablist partner JAM -- are daring to mix high-tech audio-with-video media in live performance, and as they say, it's an experiment, in a direction that live performance seems sure to go. Mn'JAM, photo by Charlotte Steunebrink Grounded in jazz fundamentals (call and response, in-the-moment interactions, individualized expression, rhythmic drive, repertoire; she went to Berklee, he to New … [Read more...]
2018 jazz, blues and beyond deaths w/ links
Cecil Taylor, March 15, 1929 – April 5, 2018, photo by Sánta István Csaba Not a happy post, but a useful one: here are the hundreds of musicians and music industry activists who died in 2018, as compiled by photographer-writer Ken Franckling for the Jazz Journalists Association. Ken scoured local newspapers, the Jazzinstitut Darmstadt newsletter, AllAboutJazz.com, Wikipedia, the New York Times, Legacy.com, Rolling Stone, Variety, JazzTimes.com, blogs, listserves, Facebook pages and European publications. Links to their fuller … [Read more...]
Legacies of Music Makers
The deaths of multi-instrumentalist Joseph Jarman, best known as the face-painted shaman of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Alvin Fielder, re-conceptualizing drummer, remind us that artists' contributions to music extend beyond recordings and awards. Read my essay at NPR Music, commissioned by Nate Chinen of WBGO, on the enduring legacies of Jarman and Fielder, both founding members of the still thriving Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) NY and Chicago). … [Read more...]
Extraordinary Popular Delusions, Chicago free improv all-stars
Jim Baker, keys& synth; Brian Sandstrom, bass; Steve Hunt, drums; Ed Wilkerson, saxes, didgeridoo, oud, Mars Williams, reeds and toys -- photo by Marc PoKempner Keyboardist and synthesizer specialist Jim Baker has led the collective quartet Extraordinary Popular Delusions playing every Monday night in obscure Chicago venues for the past 13 years. My article on EPD, which features saxophonists Mars Williams and Edward Wilkerson Jr. (they switch off), multi-instrumentalist (bass, guitar, trumpet) Brian Sandstrom and percussionist/drummer … [Read more...]
Luminous PoKempner pix of Sun Ra’s celestial music
Marshall Allen, ageless 94, leads the Sun Ra Arkestra If you liked Black Panther, listen to the music that introduced and embodies Afro-Futurism. Photojournalist Marc PoKempner captured a bit of the celestial magic of the Sun Ra Arkestra (est. circa 1954) during its November touchdown in New Orleans's Music Box Village. This picturesque venue is an assembly of little houses which MPoK says "each has some sound producing capability - bells, chimes, horns, drums." (Above: Marshall Allen, Arkestra leader since 1995. All photos here Marc … [Read more...]
Chicago blues at 90
Guitarist Jimmy Johnson's birthday at Space - photos by Harvey Tillis Jimmy Johnson at Space, Evanston -- all photos thanks to Harvey Tillis Blues have been heard in Chicago for about 100 years -- and blues guitarist Jimmy Johnson has been alive for 90 of them. Johnson, born just four years after Papa Charlie Jackson was reported busking with his guitar on Maxwell Street, celebrated his entry to ninth decade last Wednesday night at Space in Evanston, and proved to be as powerful and thrilling a player/singer as he's been since the 1970s, … [Read more...]