Boston — historically stuffy but blue-blood liberal, devoted to higher education, high finance and professional sports — is now doubling down on itself as a world-class jazz city. Berklee College of Music, nearly 4500 students strong and  an economic engine onto itself, is generating energy that enlivens Boston’s  neighborhoods, drawing in general audiences with such outreach events as the Beantown Jazz Festival, the free street fair held last weekend. JazzBoston, a non-profit grassroots  organization, has announced that its 2014  “Jazz Week,” celebrated during April, which is Jazz Appreciation Month, will start on Patriot’s Day, April 21, when the Boston Marathon is run, and climax on International Jazz Day, produced globally by UNESCO, on April 30.

“Previously  we’ve avoided programming during the Marathon,” JazzBoston executive director Pauline Bilsky told Boston media representatives and jazz presenters at a meeting at Berklee College of Music’s Café 939 (which, full disclosure, I co-chaired as president of the Jazz Journalists Association; the Berklee Internet Radio Network was another co-sponsor). “This year we realized that more than ever the  Marathon will be a patriotic celebration. There’s no music more American than jazz. We think these two celebrations belong together.

“We also hope to work with the new Mayor to produce a public celebration of International Jazz Day that puts Boston on the map. Why shouldn’t Boston be up there with cities like Paris, Istanbul, New Orleans,  and New York?”  Those cities were central sites for UNESCO IJD activities on April 30 2012 and ’13.

Though this city has traditionally been better known for its prohibitive “blue laws” rather than its entertainment industry, Boston has been a birthplace, rearing grounds and teaching home of important American musicians since the Revolution (cf., William Billings). Renown for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, est. 1881, it has also been home to modernists Roy Haynes, Cecil Taylor, Sam Rivers, Jaki Byard, Gunther Schuller, Tony Williams, Ran Blake, George Russell and Gary Burton, who attended Berklee in the early ’60s and served on its faculty for 30 years.

Although not alone in great Boston developing advanced instruction for musicians interested in popular and practical genres — New England Conservatory, Brandeis University and Wellesley College have highly regarded programs, and MacArthur Award recipient pianist-composer Vijay Iyer has just been appointed Professor of the Arts at Harvard — Berklee attracts the top  professionals to address its students directly. When I visited the school on Thursday, Sept. 26, pianist-producer Patrice Rushen addressed the freshman class, advising all students to “Commit and contribute.” Faculty currently includes violinist Darol Anger; bassists Victor Bailey, Eugene Friesen and Dave Clark; pianists Joanne Brackeen, Laszlo Gardony, Helen Sung and Francesca Tanksley; saxophonists Bill Pierce, Frank Tiberi, Alan Chase, Walter Beasley, George Garzone, Stan Strickland and Joe Lovano; guitarists Garrison Fewell, David Gilmore, David Tronzo, Mick Goodrick and Dave Fiuczynski; rumpeter Tiger Okoshi, oudist Simon Shaheen, MC Raydar Ellis, singer-songwriter Livingston Taylor, vibist Victor Mendoza, electronics designer Neil Leonard, drummers Yoron Israel and Ralph Peterson Jr. Percussionist Terri Lynn Carrington teaches at Berklee, and was music director of the sprawling, Berklee-sponsored Beantown Jazz Fest.

Beantown Jazz Festival thoroughfare

While that one-day fest attracts something like 20,000 Bostonians of all stripes and dots to stroll several blocks, bookended by portable stages and lined with food and other vendors’ booths, it is a tough place to actually hearmusic. Young ensembles with veteran guests — like pianist Matt Savage with alto sax sage Bobby Watson — competed for listeners’ ears with a large stage set in an adjacent field. Noise (not necessarily music, not necessarily jazz) blared from the vendors’ booths. A proud, loud drum ensemble rolled back and forth through the crowd in the street, producing random audio chaos like ballbearings tossed into gearworks.

This need not be. A few simple regulations on the vendors’ use of amplification, a designated area (somewhat removed from other music-makers) for the drum troupe to pound all it wants, and better placement of stages and speakers to mitigate the bleeding of one act over to another would go a long way to enhancing the efforts of musicians who deserve to be heard, and if heard could be enjoyed. Temporary seating areas, if not folding chairs at stage-side, would be nice, too. As it is, people stand mosh-pit style or sit on stoops and grass.

We can hope JazzBoston will take those kinds of issues into account as it designs programming for its 2014 Patriot/Marathon Day activities. So far no details of programming beyond the date have been disclosed, and no discussion has been broached with the Boston Athletic Association, organizer and manager  of the Marathon. But at the JazzBoston/JJA/BIRN meeting attendees floated such ideas as  having jazz stages featuring local musicians set along the Marathon course route, special radio programming, coordination of artists from the city’s music education institutions into public venues, and media outreach using online as well as traditional platforms to snare the attention of folks who don’t currently have any contact with jazz at all — by definition, a potential market.

JazzBoston, organized in 2006, had the largest booth space at the Beantown Jazz Festival, where volunteers conducted videotaped interviews of local musicians and activists. It publishes an ongoing calendar of  area performances and is sustaining a campaign in support of local jazz radio which has grown to embrace the introduction of JazzBird, an app curating and distributing  “live-hosted” programs of online radio from around the world. In collaboration with the JJA, over the past three years the organization has nominated and consulted in the selection of “Jazz Heros.” It also supports Riffs & Raps® jazz-in-community centers and multi-generational, family-appropriate jazz presentations run by Bill Lowe and Arni Cheatham (a “Jazz Hero”).

JazzBoston’s Jazz Week partners in 2013 included  Berklee College of Music, Boston Public Library, Greater Boston Convention and Visitors Bureau, the New England Conservatory, MassJazz, Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism and in 2012 the Consulate General of Japan. As tens of thousands of runners take to the Marathon course next April 21, and people across America reflect on the anniversary of last April’s devastating Marathon bombings, jazz may be a salve to the soul and/or a sound of celebration. At the JazzBoston/JJA/BIRN meeting, it was reported that both candidates for Mayor of Boston have pledged to rescind Boston’s notoriously burdensome entertainment licensing laws, which would be a boon to producers and presenters, musicians and audiences, too.

The impulse to play is irrepressible. Last Thursday I heard a quartet  led by pianist David Bryant and tenor saxophonist Tom Hall at the Outpost, a simple room in a yoga studio in Cambridge’s Inman Square. There were only five people in attendance, but the musicians (John Turner, bass; Eric Rosenthal, drums) put their all into improvisations that built on the freedoms and responsibilities proposed by innovators such as Ornette Coleman, with whom Bryant studied and worked. On a long walk of Massachusetts Avenue back toward Boston’s Copley Square, music poured out of bars and restaurants. Young people were out carousing, and carousing calls for music. I heard djs, reggae, a cover band playing classic rock. It felt like ground zero for the up ‘n’ coming audience. Those smart kids from Berklee and their friends from MIT, Boston U, Tufts, Emerson College, Harvard, etc. seem open and ready for anything. Why shouldn’t they like jazz?

PS: My friend Gordon Marshall is a Boston blogger who writes about rock as well as improvised, jazz-related music. In connection with doubling down, I’ve posted some of his music-inspired poetry.

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Buddy Guy, right, gets his cake — Iridium 7/29/13 — at left, Gary Clark Jr., Quinn Sullivan center, red shirt. Photo by Griffin Lotz for RollingStone.com

“People don’t know the blues,” guitarist/singer/songwriter Buddy Guy, who turned 77 today, told a packed house at Iridium Jazz Club  in NYC last night. The show was video-taped, presumably for a PBS showing next fall. “They say the blues is sad, but when B.B. King sings ‘I got a sweet little angel, I love the way she spreads her wings,’ I don’t know what’s sad about that.”

Guy’s own set, featuring his tight quintet, two backup singers and guest guitarists Quinn Sullivan (his amazing 14-year-old protege) and Gary Clark Jr., featured songs from his just-released 2-cd album Rhythm & Blues that were much more about exuberance than bad luck and trouble. His main complaint is that there’s little blues on the blues anymore, (pace Bob Porter and Steve Cushing). Oh, Buddy’s tangled with some tough women, cf “(I Think I Married) The Devil’s Daughter” on the new recording, but he’s never been one for bleakness and despair. His guitar playing, especially, has always been about breaking out and busting loose, which is why Jimi Hendrix lauded Buddy as an influence, why Muddy Waters brought Buddy into his band in the ’60s, wby he was house guitarist for Chess and backed up Big Mama Thornton and Little Walter Jacobs on “Hound Dog,” how he balanced the dramatic stage act of his dear departed partner Junior Wells. For proof, see the terrific videos below.

“We had a whole lot of fun,” Buddy said of Junior with all due rue at Iridium, before launching into their infectious theme song, “Messin’ with the Kid.” On the cd, Kid Rock tries to fill Junior’s shoes, but like too many pretenders, doesn’t distinguish squalling from soul.

That’s not the case for Buddy. His own vocal chorus on “Messin'” on the record is full-throated and authoritative. Several times last night he sang in his angelic yet not quite innocent upper register, with a broad smile on his face even when he seemed to be pleading. His new album is highly produced — on some tracks there are horns, backup singers and sitters-in Steve Tyler, Joe Perry, Bradford Whitford, Beth Hurt, Keith Urban, Beth Hurt — and the extras don’t blunt the music’s edge. That’s because the spine of it all is Guy’s undiminished guitar genius, which does not stop at his trademark flashy licks, instead frequently reaching for more dissonant clusters, abstract sound effects and keening, zillion-note phrases.

An American icon who’s received a Kennedy Center lifetime achievement award from President Obama in 2012, an honorary doctorate from Louisiana State University earlier this year, several Grammies etc., Buddy Guy (aka Friendly Chap) takes his age and experience seriously, as a point of pride and mastery. When the crowd at Iridium called out “Happy Birthday, Buddy!” he replied, “Don’t push me, I still got a couple hours left.” But in the next moment, he was convincingly staking his claim to relevance and vigor. “There ain’t nothing I haven’t done/I’ve been a dog and I’ve been a tom cat/I’ve chased some tail and left some tracks . . .When it comes to lovin’/I ain’t never done./ I feel like I’m 21/But I’m 77 years young!” He wrote and recorded that as “74 Years Young” three years ago, and evidently hasn’t lost a step. We should all be so lucky. Here’s hoping — and happy birthday, many more, Buddy!

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Last night I improvised a profile of Cecil Taylor for BBC Newshour (June 21, “Severe Flooding in India“), on the announcement that the great pianist/composer/improviser has been honored with the prestigious, $500,000 Kyoto Award. My triptych Miles Ornette Cecil – Jazz Beyond Jazz, of course, includes a lot of my writing/thinking on Cecil — who I aver is and will be known widely for a long time by that one name alone —  but I get fresh enthusiasm and ideas about music (not only his music, but certainly that) whenever I listen to or even just think about it.

The segment starts with a snippet of “Tales (8 Whisps)” from Unit Structures at 45:30 and ends with some clusters from Air Above Mountains.

I’m flattered to be on Newshour, which twice daily features breaking news and serious  reportage about momentous international events (in this show, the catastrophic floods in India and non-stop violence in Dagestan). The hosts often do interviews that ask powerful people uncomfortable questions. More journalism like that!

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Cecil Taylor, whose intense, lengthy and complex piano improvisations have redefined jazz and redesigned his instrument, has been awarded the 2013 Kyoto Prize for “Arts and Philosophy: Music.” Former recipients include Olivier Messiaen, John Cage, Iannis Xenakis, György Ligeti, Pierre Boulez, Witold Lutoslawski and Nikolaus Harnoncourt — all musicians/composers of Western European classical lineage. Prizes for individuals who have “contributed significantly to the progress of science, the advancement of civilization, and the enrichment and elevation of the human spirit” have also been announced in the fields of Advanced Technology and Basic Science.

Taylor has previously been honored with Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships, and named an NEA Jazz Master among other awards and prizes. I posted a lengthy appreciation of him on the occasion of his 84th birthday. My personal favorites among Taylor’s approximately 70 recordings include the solos Fly! Fly! Fly! Fly! Fly! and Air Above Mountains, and his ensemble masterpieces Unit Structures and Conquistador.

The Kyoto Prize was established by Kazuo Inamori in 1984; Dr. Inamori is also the founder of the  Kyocera Corporation, an international firm dealing in a wide range of products including electronic components and consumer cellular phones and cameras. It is one of the highest honors conferred in Japan. Taylor, a longtime resident of Brooklyn, will be awarded his diploma, 20K gold Kyoto Prize medal and prize money of 50 million yen (approx US$500,000) in Kyoto, November 2013. His next scheduled concert is a solo performance at the Willisau (Switzerland) Jazz Festival, on September 1.

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Santá explains:

Just came back from Transylvania and usually I’m isolated from all the news when I’m there.

In January I met Mulgrew two times, once in the Dizzy’s Club and once in the William Patterson School in New Jersey where he was the director, I even get lost in the school and asked him to show me the way out.

Mulgrew knew both the ins and the outs of jazz — the last time I myself heard him was in November, in Germany, where he was in the triumphant quintet headed by reedsmen Yusef Lateef and Archie Shepp, with bassist Reggie Workman and drummer Hamid Drake. Mulgrew was the imperturbable, interactive man who connected that multi-faceted rhythm section to the venturesome front line. He was always good at that — with Betty Carter, Art Blakey, Woody Shaw and Tony Williams. All gone now. But like Carter and Blakey especially, Mulgrew invested in the future as Director of Jazz Studies at William Paterson University and the Artist in Residence at Lafayette College for 2008-2009, teaching and mentoring in the classroom as he did on the job. Mulgrew Miller is already much missed. Luckily, his music remains and his image as captured by Santá says a lot about him, too.

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Bob Koester,
jazz & blues record man – photo credit sought, no copyright infringement intended

Congrats to Bob Koester, indie owner and producer of Chicago’s Delmark Records, on the label’s 60th anniversary, which it celebrated over the weekend — and lucky are listeners to jazz beyond jazz for the broad yet niche-like taste that has informed his Quixotic efforts from the start.

Not that I was there in 1953. No — I discovered Koester’s Jazz Record Mart (the old location on Grand Ave.) the day after Christmas 1967, becoming quickly, completely absorbed in the vast, vivid, unexpected worlds of music and culture the tiny shop seemed to open into, and I hung out there constantly, even racking up one post-college year of clerking there circa 1972.

It was a narrow, dusty place between a currency exchange and a steam-table restaurant for down-on-their-luckers, but absolutely the center of info on who was playing where and when in Chi environs — we used to advance that info weekly to the newspapers’ listings writers. Stacks of 78s sat there priced at a dime or a dollar; musicians associated with Delmark such as Jimmy Dawkins, Big Joe Williams and Junior Wells, as well as those passing through town including Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Betty Carter and Dave Holland used to visit, too.

Those five years gave me plenty of time to soak up the pleasures, rare and often obscure, of the Delmark catalog in the significant developmental phase during which it grew unlike any other jazz record venture before or since. This is no small thing, since at the time jazz and blues were recorded and issued (on vinyl lps) by labels including Arhoolie, Argo, Arista, Atco, Atlantic, Beehive, Bet-Car, Biograph, Black Jazz, Black Saint, Blue Note, BYG-Actuel, Cadet, Capitol, Catalyst, Chess, Chiaroscuro, Columbia Records, Concord, Creative World, CTI, ECM, Elektra, Embryo, ESP-disk, Chess, Fantasy, Flying Dutchman, Fontana, GNP Crescendo, Groove Merchant, JCOA, Impulse!, Mainstream, Milestone, MPS, Muse, Nessa, Onyx, Palo Alto, Pablo, Perception, Philly Jazz, Prestige, RCA, Riverside, Roulette, Sackville, Saturn, Solid State, Spivey, Steeplechase, Strata-East, Takoma, Testament, Theresa, Vanguard, Vee-Jay, Verve, Warner Bros., World Pacific, Xanadu, Yazoo, and a lots of others, even more obscure.

Obscurity has never fazed but evidently always fascinates Koester, a font of exacting, detailed (not to say  “trivial”) information about the arcane histories of American recording labels prior to (but many as independent as) his own. In conversation he likely without cue to  bring up some long out-of-print title from some short-lived firm with mostly regional distribution half a century ago, a trait that accounts for his having been able to acquire and reissue masters once owned by the imprints Apollo, Euphonic Sounds and United.

As long as I’ve known him, Bob has been a man of strong and catholic tastes, but he’s not an elitist or an esthete. His personal preferences have always been for traditional jazz and rough-hewn Delta post WWII blues — yet under his supervision the first works of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians were rec0rded, Sun Ra’s earliest big-bop band albums were distributed, Junior Wells with “Friendly Chap” as well as Magic Sam and Otis Rush shaped the sound of  electric rock-soul blues.

Whenever Delmark Records is mentioned, Wells’ classic Hoodoo Man Blues comes up, with good reason.
I love that record’s spare, taut, self-restrained hipness. And then there’s Sound, Roscoe Mitchell’s unprecedented, still astonishing debut and the first release
by musicians from the AACM. But there are other classics on Delmark you ought to know about, including at least two of Wells’ other  albums: South Side Blues Jam, which features terrific accompaniment by pianist Otis Spann, and On Tap, a tightknit production with snap, crackle and pop. Here are some further (by no means all) Delmark standouts:

The Dirty Dozens, by Speckled Red — “You got the right string but the wrong yo-yo,” murmurs the solo pianist/singer who bounces through one of the most ringing, upbeat barrelhouse ‘n’ boogie programs I’ve heard — the first Delmark release.

1. Sound, Roscoe Mitchell — The first recording issued by an AACM cast, saxophonist/composer Mitchell’s structural originality, confusions of scale through sensitivity to dynamics and mordant humor already fully formed.

Song For, Joseph Jarman — Saxophonist/composer and poet Jarman soon joined Mitchell in the Art Ensemble of Chicago, but here performs with the sole document of tenorist Fred Anderson’s young quartet. All the AACM records are very different: Song For is fiercely expressionistic.

Three Compositions of the New Jazz, by Anthony Braxton — Cerebral, mysterious and penetrating, the “three compositions” for Braxton’s alto,
Wadada Leo Smith’s dark trumpet and Leroy Jenkins’ astringent violin (with Muhal Richard Abrams on one track) go where no jazz went before.

Things to Come From Those Now Gone, Muhal Richard Abrams — Abrams’ third Delmark album demonstrates his unusual tunefulness with a broad range of rarely heard collaborators such as tenor saxophonist Edwin Daugherty and 
vibist Emmanuel Cranshaw.

Humility in the Light of the Beholder, Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre —
The saxophonist/clarinetist’s debut takes Pharoah Sanders’ quasi-pantheistic spiritualism  several steps further, into and out of chaos and lyricism.

Hawk Squat! by J.B. Hutto and the Hawks — Fans of Little Ed and the Imperials, start here for a gritty yet fun-filled, non-stop show; guitarist-shouter J.B, Ed’s uncle, tears up the house.

Cold Day in Hell by Otis Rush — The extended title track is a rare example of an electric bluesman
revealing his personal torments and playing some killer guitar in pursuit of art. It’s Rush’s most committed performance.

West Side Soul/Black Magic by Magic Sam — The two full studio albums by a golden voiced crooner who transformed blues basics into irresistible party songs.

Feel Like Blowing My Horn by Roosevelt Sykes — The pianist with horns, bass and drums puts raucous blues in a setting between rough swing and roots of r&m. He hollers funny rhymes, too.

The Legend of Sleepy John Estes — Mournful solo playing and singing by an indomitable old man, rediscovered decades after his first flowering. As blue as one can get.

Archie Shepp and the New York Contemporary Five — With pocket trumpeter Don Cherry and alto saxist John Tchicai sharing the frontline, the Five dig into Ornette Coleman’s boisterous “When Will the Blue Leave?” and five other pieces showing a range of strong early ’60s ideas.

All for Business by Jimmy Dawkins — In his debut album, bluesman Dawkins was dry almost to the point of bitter — his words bite, his guitar stings.

Sweet Home Chicago — The outstanding introduction of guitarist-singer-songwriter Luther Allison, a taste of Magic Sam and tenor saxist
Eddie Shaw nailing a gruff wail —  lyrical, without pretense, honest urban blues.

What’s made Delmark so special is that Koester has never been about making money (though if it were to happen, he wouldn’t spurn it) and has exhibited no agenda other than to capture the boldest performances by Chicago’s genuine local geniuses, paying scant attention to conventions or niceties of style. Since I worked at the JRM, Delmark has done well by cutting edge and emergent jazz players including Nicole Mitchell, Rob Mazurek, Jason Adasiewicz, Eric Alexander, Ernest Dawkins, Kahil El Zabar (for whom I’ve written liner notes), Brad Goode, Jeff Parker and Josh Berman, among others — blues people Lurrie Bell, Big Time Sarah, Dave Stryker, Tail Dragger and Willie Kent. Despite modest marketing and promotion, the label has succeeded in establishing international reputations for many of its artists and helped sustain the thriving local scene. Delmark’s secret is the integrity implicit in its every release. Long may the label live.

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I’m just thrilled UNESCO partnered with the Monk Institute to produce the second International Jazz Day, April 30 — the culmination of Jazz Appreciation Month (so designated by the Smithsonian Institute) and what the Jazz Journalists Assoc., over which I preside, called JazzApril. The rest of this post might be considered self-promoting, ’cause I’m going to kvell over how the JJA celebrated the localization of this global event and why I think it’s important. So read on only if you’re interested in Louis Armstrong, trumpet music, Jazz Heroes, local scenes, what’s happening in the U.S. and the media that might carry news of culture to people as they get news now.

The live and mostly exciting two-and-a-half-hour webcast of a star-studded concert from Istanbul

is on Youtube for universal free access. The music starts 37 minutes in, with Joss Stone singing what MC Herbie Hancock calls “music of your soul” — “Some Kind of Wonderful” w/Joe Louis Walker, Ramsey Lewis, James Genus and Vinnie Coliauta, followed for tw0 hours by musical segments featuring Ruben Blades, Al Jarreau, Dianne Reeves, Esperanza Spalding and Robert Glasper, Milton Nascimento, Hugh Masakela –a lot of singing, but always with very strong instrumentalists (Keiko Matsui, Alevtina Polyakova, Imer Demirer, George Duke, Marcus Miller, Terri Lynne Carrington, Eddie Palmieri, Terence Blanchard, Anat Cohen, Igor Butman, John McLaughlin duetting with Lee Ritenour, Jean-Luc Ponty, Christian McBride, Zakir Hussain, Wayne Shorter — all organized by pianist/music director John Beasley) engaged in what they do best: Playimg. Purists and snobs may carp there’s no experimentalism (other than that inherent in fresh, spirited improvisation!) and nothing specifically harkening back to traditional jazz of the ’20s/’30s/’40s. But this event is intended by definition to be mainstream, and overall it’s rousing, upbeat, high quality entertainment.

Admirable as the far-reaching nature of  such an event is, considering the state of jazz here in the U.S. where it was born IJD’s global ambitions must be balanced with near-at-hand realizations. To enable that, and impress upon jazz audiences the decentralized nature of jazz (which has always been the case, though the power of New York-based press and recording companies long obscured it), the JJA encouraged two dozen parties organized by local jazz activists celebrating local Jazz Heroes. Although this year’s heroes include such instrumentalists as Beegie Adair, Craig Alston, Marcus Belgrave, Karl Berger and Ingrid Sertso, Mwata Bowden, Kidd Jordan and Julian Priester, these Jazz Hero Awards and the others were presented not principally on the basis of their musicianship, but due also to their activities presenters, educators, community stalwarts, broadcasters, mentors. There are newly-named Jazz Heroes from Atlanta and Austin to Baltimore, Bloomington, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, Gainesville, Nashville, New Orleans, Nogales, Philadelphia, Portland OR, Schenectady, Seattle, Tallahassee, Tucson, Washington DC, Woodstock, Ottawa (the Bay Area, Chicago, NYC and Newark still to come).

Several mayors and other local officials issued proclamations extolling jazz, and even showed up at the celebrations to read them. Newspapers ran coverage, photos were posted online, radio stations picked up the news, journalists blogged about the Heroes, social media postings emerged, buzz was raised, profiles lifted, jazz was noticed. And this is essential to getting future coverage of jazz, funding for jazz, building audiences for jazz, instilling appreciation for and pride in jazz, validating jazz musicians and their followers, fostering the enjoyment of it every day all over America — not only in the Big Apple, in major festivals, with the occasional tv special 0r melodramatic bio-pic, but as a reflective, evolving aspect of our environment, the audible expression of our creative best.

Here in NYC, the Louis Armstrong House Museum — one of the most stunning of all institutions situating jazz squarely in mainstream residential communities — co-hosted a party with the JJA at the Langston Hughes Library and Community Center in Queens, a similarly down-home establishment. What could be more fitting? Armstrong the  genius with genuine, career-long love of his fans, who lived in a modest bungalow when he could have bought a palace, and Hughes, poet of “The Weary Blues,” portrayer of low-income Harlemite Jesse B. “Simple” Semple. About 100 people, all attending for free. Trumpeter Stephanie Richards composed a Fanfare for Louis, performed by a hastily rehearsed quartet of brassists — herself, Jeremy Pelt, Igmar Thomas and David Weiss.

from left: Michael Cogswell, Stanley Crouch w/Bloomberg proclamation
and Howard Mandel
photo by Susan Brink

Then Dan Morgenstern, dean of jazz journalists and a member of Armstrong’s coterie from 1949 until his death in 1971, detailed some memories of Pops, especially at his early ’60s performances at Freedomland Amusement Park in the Bronx. Dan was there. Ricky Riccardi, the extraordinary scholar of Armstrong (and official archivist at LAHM) who has a palpable delight in this man and deep knowledge of his every era, spoke of the newly discovered 1961 recordings spun for us, including a beautiful, noble version of Armstrong’s classic “West End Blues,” first recorded in 1928. Finally Stanley Crouch spoke, marveling at Louis “sound,” and joined LAHM director Michael Cogswell, Hughes Center director Andrew Jackson, Ricky and Dan and me in reading the handsomely inscribed statement issued by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg hailing Jazz Day. And we ate soul food from Keicha’s Catering— red beans and rice, quite good and seemingly healthy lightly fried chicken cubes, meat balls, pasta salad, cookies and little cream puffs.

JJA members and unaffiliated colleagues turned out (and I should have introduced them from the stage): Ted Panken, Russ Musto, Jared Negley, Paul Devlin, Tim Wilkins, Dan Kassell, Susan Brink, Alan Nahigian, Morgenstern of course (a winner of the JJA’s Lifetime Achievement in Jazz Journalism Award, as well as of the NEA’s Jazz Master honor) — and also Jimmy Heath with his wife Mona, pianist-composer Amina Figarova (originally from Azerbijan, just last fall she received her green card) and her husband flutist Bart Platteau (originally from Belgium; now they live in Forest Hills), and singer Antoinette Montague. Cable network NY1 covered us (I can’t find the video online, though — looking! or the UStream video, which may have not been saved). Maybe some of those journos have written us up. Thanks to LAHM public relations specialist Jennifer Walden we were mentioned in Queens neighborhood papers, the New York Daily News (thanks to Greg Thomas!) and the NYTimes listings last Friday. Following the event there was a flurry of  social media notes of appreciation, and Ricky Riccardi didn’t blog about it but did put a photo on fb. Stephanie Richards has sent a score to the House Museum for its archives.

So everyone was happy. We feted jazz with new music and enduring music, talk about music, food and schmooze. We were international and local. We were free and inclusive. We felt like we’d celebrated a holiday, and planned to do it again next year. But not waiting ’til then — I’m off to hear some jazz tonight.

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On the second International Jazz Day, let’s celebrate —

Jazz Heroes designated in 2013 by the Jazz Journalists Association
and 25 local North American communities

1) A glorious legacy of enduring music;

2) The dedication to the art form of musicians and their supporters now, worldwide;

3) The recognition by government officials and institutions of jazz as an entity that will not be silenced or co-opted;

4) Access as never before, via the internet, to jazz historical and present;

5) The rise of jazz education

6) The widespread popularity of jazz festivals

7) Jazz that retains its essence while inviting, embracing, absorbing influences from everywhere, everything;

8) Writing, photography, dance, visual arts inspired and/or derived from the listening experience;

9) Rhythm, unabated

10) Melodies, infinite.

I want to acknowledge the economic forces that keep jazz going, the boundless imagination of the greatest jazz artists and the unbowed spirit that lives in the spontaneous interactivity of this most open, expressive and truthful music. Long live jazz and the culture that creates it. (go to JJAJazzAwards for profiles of each of the Jazz Heroes above, and at noon ET on May 1 for names of the winners of musical categories in the 17th annual JJA Jazz Awards).

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Is it hard to sustain four weeks of Jazz Appreciation Month? With the defeat of gun-control measures, bombings in Boston, ricin attacks on the President, fertilizer explosions in Texas — promotion of jazz as a positive cultural entity might have seemed less than relevant.

“Tote that barge, lift that bail” —
bear the burdens, sing it out – JewishCurrents.org

But when I addressed students at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, as a substitute for temporarily ailing vocalist Lisa Sokolov, the value of jazz to America (and the world) seemed as powerful as ever.

I’ve subbed for Lisa before, and enjoy introducing classic performances of jazz, blues, Americana and enduring, truly popular U.S.-born or adopted culture to college students eager to act, sing, dance — to enrich themselves and others by becoming entertaining, and yet to my astonishment (and Lisa’s) have seldom seen some of the iconic works from whose shadows they will emerge. I show my own NYU classes (in Blues, Jazz, World Music and the Roots of American Music) video clips from Youtube or dvds and videos of my collection, too. But the Tisch students are among the most responsive, even when I show relics like hammy, blackfaced Al Jolson singing “Mammy” at the end of The Jazz Singer, or Paul Robeson’s majesterial  “Ol’ Man River “ from Showboat. Judy Garland ‘s heart-rending “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” the vision of hope from the Wizard of Oz, though, gets across directly.

By then, I’ve introduced one of the indelible film clips depicting delight in life — Louis Armstrong before a Danish audience in 1933, singing, muccing and playing “that good ol’ favorites, ‘Dinah.'”

Then, to demonstrate that yes, jazzer’s know life’s not all a bowl of musings about one’s happy partnerings but we can prevail even over mean mistreating, I bring on Billie Holiday with true all-stars, singing “Fine and Mellow” from the the CBS tv’s The Sound of Jazz.

And finally here’s the John Coltrane Quartet expressing some of the most profoundly sorrowful, enraged, serenely and committedely resistent of minor blues, “Alabama” —

To me, Coltrane’s music here with drummer Elvin Jones, bassist Jimmy Garrison and pianist McCoy Tyner stands as a timely reaction to the horrors of attacks on the innocent, sadness at the refusal of too many public figures to take serious, obvious steps to right age-old wrongs and regulate ever-dangerous circumstances. There is more upbeat jazz — Fats Waller, Lambert Hendricks and Ross, Bobby McFerrin top the list of videos to restate the joy Louis Armstrong brought to our undeniably beautiful, but also so terrible, world.

All these videos are evidence that jazz grasps the spirit people have within that sustains us. I can’t think of anything I’d have rather have done, or better have done, to celebrate Jazz Appreciation Month culminating in International Jazz Day — the two initiatives which the Jazz Journalists Association calls JazzApril, that to show emerging artists the standards they can look to, perhaps live up to.

howardmandel.com

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