Despite my avowed abhorrence of Christmas music, I enjoyed maestro Kurt Elling leading his hometown quintet in a holiday-themed performance at Chicago's City Winery last Sunday. My entire evening -- accompanied by best friends, and including the surprise discovery after the Winery show of a heartening young trumpeter at the Hungry Brain -- was a reminder that hearing music in person with others is a key experience, even if the potential for spreading disease makes us stay home. [What I've been listening to at home: Favorites of … [Read more...]
Jazz Autumn: Returns, galas and even awards
If all "jazz" shares a single trait, it's that nothing will stifle it. Adjusting to covid-19 strictures, Chicago (just for instance) in the past two months has been site of: A stellar Hyde Park Jazz Festival;Herbie Hancock's homecoming concert at Symphony Center;audiences happily (for the most part - no reported incidents otherwise) observing appropriate covid restrictions in intimate venues where I've been -- including Constellation, the Jazz Showcase, Hungry Brain and Fitzgerald's; a heartening multi-kulti success -- Japanese taiko … [Read more...]
In praise of Donald Newlove
I was knocked out on first reading of Sweet Adversity (1978), by Donald Newlove, who died Aug. 17 at age 93. It's about co-joined twins who love Louis Armstrong, play jazz in the 1930s and arrive New York's Lower East Side in the early 1960s, where one of them sobers up. Besides the unique story, it's the novel's language that dazzles -- intricate, high-spirited sentences that conjured unusual images and ringing perceptions in a continuous, unpredictable stream. It's hilarious, delirious and heartbreaking, a classic American serio-comedy … [Read more...]
City of Chicago, music promoter
Lollapalooza 2021 had some 385,000 attendees (without significant Covid-19 outbreak, fortunately) but featured little of host Chicago's indigenous talent or styles. And that's just wrong, declared Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events commissioner Mark Kelly, launching the month-long Chicago in Tune "festival" at a reception August 19. Here's the still-evolving event calendar of hundreds of local music performances -- of every conceivable genre, free and ticketed, outside or in, most requiring vax proof and/or masks -- … [Read more...]
Tania Leon interview 1989
Tania Leon, 2021 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for music composition, has not often been interviewed in the popular press, so here's a Q&A I conducted with her as published in 1989 by Ear magazine, and Jeremy Robins' 2007 Composers Portrait of her, commissioned by American Composers Orchestra. Tania Leon, Assistant conductor of the Brooklyn Philharmonic, has distinguished herself as a proponent of music without category beyond a standard of excellence. Her enthusiasm for contemporary composers regardless of gender, race or national … [Read more...]
Record man Koester’s blues and jazz legacy
Chicagoan Bob Koester, proprietor of the Jazz Record Mart and Delmark Records for nearly 70 years, is a model of music activism and entrepreneurship from an era rapidly receding and unlikely in current business circumstances. Neil Genzlinger did a nice formal New York Times obit, and I've written a remembrance for the Chicago Reader. Although some independent record stores dealing new and used physical recordings remain in Chicago, I know of none co-joined to an active independent record company, and at the hub of a metropolis-wide … [Read more...]
More on live jazz streaming, Chicago to Zurich and beyond
Saxophonist Chico Freeman, a third-generation Chicago jazzman, live-streams his new international band from Zurich on Saturday 2/27 at 2:30 pm ET, and I moderated their Zoom talk of coming together for the first time in person -- a rarity over the past 10 months -- with Carine Zuber, artistic director of Moods Digital, as part of their three-day residency. The perspective and genuine high spirits at getting to collaborate in physical proximity of these extraordinary musicians -- besides Freeman, the UK-born four-mallet vibes/marimba … [Read more...]
Jazz beats the virus online
Chicago presenters of jazz and new music, and journalists from Madrid to the Bay Area, vocalist Kurt Elling, trumpeter Orbert Davis and pianist Lafayette Gilchrist discussed how they've transcended coronavirus-restrictions on live performances with innovative methods to sustain their communities of musicians and listeners, as well as their own enterprises were in two Zoom panels I moderated last week . The Show Goes On - Online on February 18 convened Chris Anderson of the Fulton Street Collective, trumpeter Davis of Chicago Jazz … [Read more...]
Boogie-man Helfer bounces back from covid-depression
Erwin Helfer, the 84-year-young Chicago pianist of heartfelt blues, boogie, rootsy American swing and utterly personal compositions, has told his tale of covid-19-related profound depression, hospitalization, treatment and recovery to the Chicago Sun Times. I'm a longtime friend, ardent fan and two-time record producer of Erwin's, and had lunch with him soon after the article ran. He was in fine fettle -- a great relief to me and the rest of the large, devoted community that's been deeply concerned about his health since April, when his … [Read more...]
RIP Annie Ross: Her last stand with Jon Hendricks
Annie Ross, who died July 21 at age 89, sold "Loch Lomond" as a seven-year- old in the Little Rascals with brass equal to her hero in "Farmers Market" hawking beans. The child of Scottish vaudevillians, she was maybe never shy. In 2002 I reported on her last stand with fellow vocalese icon Jon Hendricks, at the Blue Note in Manhattan for the newspaper City Arts. The second-to-last set ever to be sung by Hendricks and Ross, two-thirds of the vocal trio once hailed as "the hottest new group in jazz" was delightful, sad, instructive and … [Read more...]
Love movies, jazz, and thinking about them? A treat
Movies, jazz and reading remain my favorite solitary diversions, and Fresh Air critic Kevin Whitehead enables immersion in all three with Play The Way You Feel: The Essential Guide to Jazz Stories on Film, his entertaining, provocative, deeply informed look at some 120 flicks and a handful of tv shows relating tales that mirror or inform American culture. From The Jazz Singer (1928), long cited as the first motion picture with sound (it wasn't exactly, but launched the form) to Bolden, a too-little distributed imagining of the first … [Read more...]
Four months of jazz adaptation, resilience, response to epidemic
In early March - only four months ago - I flew between two of the largest U.S. airports, O'Hare and JFK, to visit New York City. I stayed in an East Village apt. with my daughter and a nephew crashing on her couch. We ate barbecue at a well-attended Jazz Standard performance by drummer Dafnis Prieto's sextet, and the next day I went to a celebration of Ornette Coleman's birthday, his demise five years ago and his ongoing spirit, hosted by his son Denardo at the Coleman's midtown loft. Noted improvisers David Murray, Graham Haynes, … [Read more...]
Revered jazz elders, deceased: portraits by Sánta István Csaba
As a generation of jazz elders leaves our world -- some hastened by the pandemic -- their faces as photographed by Sánta István Csaba become even more luminous, haunting, iconic. Originally from Transylvania and currently living in Turin, the northern Italian area with heaviest covid-19 infections, Sánta reports that he is healthy, employed at the reception desk of a nearby school, and has recently been honored with a Hungarian Press Photo Award. However, with the lockdown, that Awards ceremony has been indefinitely postponed. … [Read more...]