Today — April 14 —  is the 80th birthday of one of America’s greatest musical game-changers, Morton Subotnick, the man who: co-founded the San Francisco Tape Music Center; envisioned and developed the electronic synthesizer as a tabletop orchestral palette; created Silver Apples of the Moon, the first  composition intended specifically for the long-playing vinyl record […]

Second week of Jazz Appreciation Month: pianist Edsel Gomez talked  in my NYU “World Music” class of working with Malian musicians on Dee Dee Bridgewater’s extrafine Red Earth project; Ralph Simon, producer of late lamented Postcard Records and soprano saxist, had a private with me consultation on resuming jazz activities; Bassist Charnett Moffett at Birdland, midtown, for […]

An elder of African-American culture, a master improviser, a heroic performer, recording artist and educator, a genius who denounces the term “jazz” (but is an NEA Jazz Master) and reviles all the “vulgarity” which has traditionally been associated with the music but has never abjured blues, grit and funk — multi-reeds specialist Yusef Lateef at […]

I’m as sad as any Chicago-born & raised movie fan about the death of Roger Ebert, who I saw regularly in the Chicago Sun Times/Chicago Daily News offices when I was a copyboy there in the ’70s, but to whom I never spoke. And I take umbrage at the characterization of him as a “middle-brow” […]

Jazz in NYC and vicinity early in Jazz Appreciation Month: Since Monday, April 1 I’ve — heard the all-star Monterey Jazz Fest on Tour band at the Blue Note Jazz Club, and singer Imani Uzuri w/band there, too; learned about the James Moody Democracy in Jazz Festival (sponsored by TD Bank) at the New Jersey […]

April is Jazz Appreciation Month (so named by the Smithsonian Institution), culminating on the 30th with International Jazz Day (a project of UNESCO, organized by the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz) — and both those initiatives are endorsed by the U.S. Conference of Mayors. So the Jazz Journalists Association has launched a major media campaign called […]

It was a big deal in Stockton, CA last Friday, when Wynton Marsalis led his Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra at the 12th annual jazz festival produced by the Brubeck Institute at University of the Pacific.  The ticket holders’ line to enter the nicely restored Fox movie palace — now the Bob Hope Theatre, in the center […]

One-of-a-kind American master musical artist Cecil Taylor turns 84 today, March 25, and deserves our culture’s gratitude. His life has been one of relentless, intense, sweeping creativity, which has driven global developments in composition, improvisation, performance, attire and contemporary lifestyle to a much greater degree than has been much acknowledged —  although Taylor does have […]

Ornette Coleman turns 83 today — and is celebrating it privately. That’s unusual, as he has thrown great parties, often full of live music (at his former Harlem Studio and one year at Joe’s Pub), always attended by fabulously interesting people — like the one last year for his 82nd birthday, Friday, March 9, 2012 […]

Dr. Donald Byrd was a trumpeter with an ear for the vernacular and fresh talent. Jayne Cortez was a radical poet — both esthetically and personally. Butch Morris was a jazz cornetist, composer, conductor and conductioner. Let’s celebrate the lives and creativity of all three. Strangely, reports by a nephew of Byrd’s death at age 80 on February 4 […]