International jazz journalists, academic scholars, presenters and musicians rarely meet together, but that’s the plan for the “Lost in Diversity” conference  during the 14th Enjoy Jazz Fest, which I’m attending tomorrow (Nov 7) through Sunday in Heidelberg, Germany. Curated by ethnomusicologist and sociologist Dr. Christian Broecking

of the Heidelberg Center of American Studies in the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität (oldest in Germany, founded 1386), this is the only such transatlantic summit meeting I’ve heard of since “Jazz in the Global Imagination,” a one-day symposium produced by the Center for Jazz Studies, Columbia University with assistance from the Jazz Journalists Association in 2007. That’s where I first met Broecking, and it seems to be one of the models for this event.

The music in Heidelberg will be extraordinary: pianist Herbie Hancock solo; an Archie Shepp/Yusef Lateef-led quintet with all-stars Reggie Workman, Mulgrew Miller and Hamid Drake; concerts by Bill Frisell, Madeliene Peyroux, Vijay Iyer, Alexander von Schlippenbach and Billy Hart (with his quartet featuring Ethan Iverson). I bet the talks, about the present-day relevance of jazz across cultures, will be fascinating, too.

I’m speaking on “Motivations in U.S. Jazz,” while my friend and colleague Ted Panken’s topic, “All Jazz Is Modern,” considers “radical aesthetics” in light of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and the AACM. Tom Carter, president of the Thelonious Monk Institute and force behind UNESCO’s International Jazz Day, has a presentation on “Jazz and Diplomacy”; National Endowment of the Arts program officer Katja von Schuttenbach will delve into her research on trailblazing pianist Jutta Hipp. Wolfram

Knauer, director of the Jazzinstitute Darmstadt; Eric Porter of University of California, Santa Cruz; Daniel Fischlin of University of Guelph; Christian Dalgas from the Copenhagen Jazz Festival, and Thomas Krüger, president of the German Federal Agency for Civic Education are among others scheduled to give addresses.

It’s hard to predict what can come out of this meeting, other than that thinkers-about-jazz will stimulate and probably challenge each other. Of course I’m of the opinion that exchanges of ideas are in themselves good things. Based on previous experience at the Jazz in the Global conference, panels at the Leeds (UK) and Tampere (Finland) jazz festivals, Guelph Jazz Colloquium, confabs at the Siena Jazz Summer Workshop and with personal contacts in Kiev, Armenia and Russia, I can attest that perspectives on jazz in the U.S. and in Europe are quite different. But that’s the “diversity” part. And if now we’re lost, getting together can only help us find. The best thing about this conference, looking for “definitions and comparisions about how jazz takes part in relevant discourses, socially and politically, on both sides of the Atlantic,” is that it’s intended to be the first in an annual series. Then too, the beer is renowned. Further reports to follow.

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I’ve been a freelance writer for almost 40 years and it hasn’t gotten easier, but I’m glad to have this blog. Why? is the question to be addressed at the JJA’s webinar “Blogging: Tales from Veterans” by Pamela Espeland (Bebopified), Willard Jenkins (The Independent Ear) and Marc Myers (JazzWax), which I’ll moderate, on Tuesday Oct. 16, 8 pm edt (we’ll end in time so we can watch the President in a Town Hall “debate” with that other guy). The webinar is free but pre-registration is required.

Having been frequently published by DownBeat, JazzTimes, Jazziz, the Chicago Daily News, Chicago Reader, Washington Post, Village Voice, Ear and Guitar World magazines among others, with columns in CityArts-New York, New York Press, The Wire (UK), Jazz Life and Swing Journal (both Japan) and Rhytmi (Finland), with two books out, articles in and editorship of others, I still have the ideas, word skills and connections to contribute professionally to publications in print and online. But without ArtsJournal.com/JazzBeyondJazz (and also NoDepression.com) much of what I have to say would be left unwritten.

Today there’s nothing like a blog to guarantee freedom of speech, disseminating important messages, joining the international conversation and reaching a discriminating audience. Oh, one can (and I do) post to Facebook, tweet, join LinkedIn groups, etc. But all that verbiage is viewable only briefly. Each of the platforms has strict limitations. Here, I can write as long as I care to, embed photos, video and audio clips, add links, attract subscribers and be discovered by search engines. Since August 2008 I’ve put up more than 450 articles — most of which have been complete within themselves, which I promote on some of those other platforms. I have no idea how many visits I’ve gotten in four years, how many eyeballs have stopped here for how long, but I must admit I’ve enjoyed it.

Although I anticipated the blog format as de facto editor in the 1990s of the Jazz Journalists Association’s former web home www.Jazzhouse.org  by publishing “postcards” from JJA members, most of which were overnight reviews, I wasn’t an early adopter of blogging. I was invited by ArtsJournal’s Doug McLennan, who I knew only by his reputation for having set this up, and urged into it by my close friend and JJA webmaster JA Kawell prior to the publication of my book Miles Ornette Cecil – Jazz Beyond Jazz. My  idea at the time was to use the blog for book promotion, to recommend upcoming performances and occasionally comment on recordings. Check, check, check.

But JazzBeyondJazz has become central to my communications operation. I’ve live-tweeted events such as the UNESCO International Jazz Day concert, had lively fb “conversations” with far-flung correspondents and made friends through LinkedIn, but I’ve established a brand and, perhaps, more identity on this space right here. It’s gained me fans and perhaps has led to some assignments. It’s kept my writing gears oiled and is ready whenever I am.

True, I do not get paid by ArtsJournal or anyone else for this blog, there is almost no other monetization of it (Full disclosure: I’m an Amazon Associate, so if you visit Amazon by clicking on one of my links that takes you there and buy something — anything — I get a micro-payment which over many months can add up to a sum in the low two-figures). And a writer ought to be paid for writing. But in the context of a digital revolution in which “information wants to be free” has been a premise and motto, the importance of having a public place to put one’s words and ideas has become crucial, especially as paying platforms have become scarce, dried up, disappeared. There are many kinds of writing I won’t do here but will gladly do as contracted. But there are many kinds of writing I can only do here, until some brilliant publisher realizes what a boon I am to all their ventures and provides me with the sinecure I so richly deserve.

While waiting, I never have to look for a blank piece of paper or an empty screen. I open my JBJ dashboard and it warmly receives my every, any thought. Of course I filter them so they appeal to someone — uh, you. I want you coming back, because I want to be read. If I have a blog, the remaining publications can close, I can be blackballed by or walk away from an editor, but I can’t really be shut up. That’s what I like about blogging: I can rant and rave or write like an immortal and here I am. If you want the freedom and potential visibility — please check out the JJA webinar. It’s the first of six on the subject, which will include online workshops about how to get started, how to proceed and fine points of the format, including (yes) possible ways of reaching that far frontier, blogging for profit.

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The Jazz for Obama talent pool fundraising for the re-election of the President at Symphony Space  (2537 Broadway, NYC) tonight is stellar. Roy Haynes, Joe Lovano, Brad Mehldau, Ron Carter, Jimmy Heath, McCoy Tyner, Kenny Barron, Jim Hall, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Ravi Coltrane, Arturo O’Farrill, Kenny Garrett, Geri Allen, Jeff ‘Tain” Watts, Christian McBride, Gretchen Partlato, Claudio Acuña, Ralph Peterson, Henry Grimes, Aaron Goldberg, Greg Hutchison know with whom their best interests lie, and it isn’t the candidate who intends to cut funds for PBS (no

doubt NPR and the NEA, too), dismantle the Affordable Care Act and increase the military budget.

Since very few jazz musicians purchase health insurance through employers, they know how difficult it is to find a decent plan at a viable rate as an individual, whatever state they live in. Jazzers are on the road a lot, so they’re unlikely to support any political party that makes it harder to vote in advance, online or by absentee ballot. As rugged individualists, they not big believers in corporations being people, too. They know better than to scorn those who don’t pay federal income tax because they’re don’t make enough $. Since they have historically been prone to sleazy business deals and royalty grabs, they are not among those who resent paying teachers, police and firemen among other civil servants for previously agreed upon and paid-for pensions. They know too much about life to regard all those receiving safety-net benefits and Social Security as lazy moochers.

Jazzers realize that there a big difference between working hard and being well paid. They have learned to operate on the economic fringes of mainstream American culture, their lifestyles often suspect and their financial foundations more creative than even the savviest hedge fund specialist’s (out of necessity, because they make do with much less, and it’s their own money/time/health/lives they’re gambling with, not someone else’s).

Furthermore, most jazz musicians are urbanites through and through, so they value government investments in public transportation and education, alternative energies and environmental protections, rather than oil wells in federal lands. I don’t know many who hunt, though I’m sure some do — and a majority are probably ok with gun control, since the shooting deaths of Lee Morgan, Eddie Jefferson, Jaki Byard and Frank Rosolino still feel raw.

Just on a personal level, they — ok, yeah, we — are probably more comfortable with a bi-racial, former stoner, community organizer who can sing a passable measure of an Al Green lyric than with a guy rich from birth, who doesn’t drink even coffee, and was a religious missionary to France. These are petty reasons to prefer one politician over another, I suppose, but they stick nonetheless.

Jazz is the free-wheeling, improvisatory American-born and globally embraced art form that is open to all comers, proudly interactive, full of humor and passion, operating in something of an alternative universe or society unto itself. But most people who play jazz depend on a strong social network and don’t claim they can go it alone. We at least claim to believe in a meritocracy. We know how to listen. We’re not, perhaps, the very best slice of the demographic at planning ahead, so I suppose the argument can be made that we’re not the people who should be figuring out how to reduce the federal deficit. But we know how to stretch what little money we get, and have firm faith that living well does not require mountains of moolah. Some of us are religious (including Muslims, Jews, maybe even Mormons) but most are firmly grounded in secular humanism — and we’re generally quite a tolerant tribe, eager for connections across supposed cultural divides, with few war-mongers. Do we live in a fantasy world? I think not. Which is why the majority of jazzers, I hazard to suggest without conducting or consulting any verifiable poll, are for Obama.

 

 

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The new list of MacArthur fellows, just released, features not one musician from the world of jazz among the 23 distinguished Americans who will receive $100,000 a year for five years.

Two musicians are named among the fellows: Claire Chase, flutist and founder of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE)

and Chris Thile, mandolinist of Nickle Creek and the Punch Brothers. I congratulate them both, as well as the other honored writers, artists, scientists, and a historian, economist, social services innovator. But considering the MacArthur program, established  since  in 1981 has included jazz-related musicians frequently since 1988 (starting with Ran Blake and Max Roach, continuing with George Russell, Ali Akbar Khan, Gunther Schuller, Cecil Taylor, Steve Lacy, Anthony Braxton, Ornette Coleman, Ken Vandermark, George E. Lewis, Edgar Meyer — with whom Chris Thile has collaborated — Reginald Robinson, Regina Carter, John Zorn, Corey Harris, Miguel Zenon, Jason Moran and Dafnis Prieto), and that the fellowships are not for past works but rather investments in the artists and hence their art forms’ futures, the absence this year is disappointing.

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Hear keyboardist-composer Muhal Richard Abrams play solo and leading a drummerless quartet tonight, 9/21/2012, at 8 pm at the Community Church or New York (40 E. 35th, between Madison and Park Ave.). It’s the first concert of the season produced by the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), the 47-year-old organization which he co-founded and has presided over, officially or otherwise.  Now 82, Muhal is a deft herder of cats, a painter of unforeseen visions and an American genius whose works haven’t had a high profile beyond a small though international circle devotees. He’s an outsiders’ insider as a largely self-taught, unconventional artist at the center of a significant musical revolution, and an insiders’ outsider as a special consultant to the highest levels of federal and state cultural administration. There’s no telling what he’ll sound like tonight.

Muhal is scheduled to play synthesizer as well as grand piano, and will feature trumpeter Jack Walrath (most famously a survivor of Mingus’ last bands), vibist Brian Carrott and bassist Brad Jones, both Abrams’ collaborators of long-standing. But fulfilling expectations is usually the  least of Muhal’s concerns, and his audience  generally savors surprise. That’s what “creative music” is all about.

He’s a man capable of improvising pieces that seem through-composed and composing pieces that seem improvised. He is most persistently identified with the “free jazz” avant garde but came up, was mentored by and recorded with mainstream-commercial yet openminded and indeed innovative saxophonist Eddie Harris and he has been commissioned by the Kronos Quartet, among others. Back in the 1960s in Chicago he established strong guiding principles for the only artists-based support-and-production group in any discipline ever to have survived so long, without enforcing any aesthetic doctrine but advancing many unique members to world-wide fame and institutional recognition. From the AACM’s first generation,the Art Ensemble of Chicago (including Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, Don Moyé, the late Lester Bowie and Malachi Favors), Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith, Amina Claudine Myers, George Lewis, Fred Anderson, Thurman Barker, Chico Freeman, Steve and Iqua Colson, Leroy Jenkins, Douglas Ewart, Kalaparusha Ahra Difda, Reggie Nicholson, Pete Cosey, Fred Hopkins, and Steve McCall have made boldly individualistic marks performing and recording (also teaching: Mitchell recently at Mills College, Braxton long at Wesleyan U., Smith at Cal Arts, Lewis at Columbia, Barker at Bard).  He’s been personally available to AACM members and unaffiliated colleagues in NYC, Chicago and elsewhere. St. Louis-connected musicians Oliver Lake, Baikida Carroll, Julius Hemphill, Marty Ehrlich, Hamiet Bluiett and Philip Wilson no less than Nicole Mitchell (now teaching at University of California Irvine), Matana Roberts (in NYC), Brandon Ross and Myra Melford (now teaching at UC Berkeley) as well as still-in-Chicago’s Ernest Dawkins, Ed Wilkerson, Ajaramu, Kahil El-Zabar, Jeff Parker, Mike Reed, Hamid Drake, Ari Brown, Mwata Bowden, Dee Alexander have benefited from Muhal’s leadership and direct or indirect guidance.

Himself a National Endowment of the Arts-designated “Jazz Master,” 2012-named Doctor of Music, honoris causa, of Columbia University and recipient of this year’s BNY Mellon Jazz 2012 Living Legacy Award (to be presented in a ceremony at the Kennedy Center on Friday, October 19, 2012, as well as the first Danish JazzPar Award (in 1990), Muhal has exerted significant behind-the-scenes influence, engaging the ears of the NEA and the New York State Council on the Arts, besides being at the birth of Chicago’s Friends of Duke Ellington Society, which turned into the Jazz Institute of Chicago. But all this speaks only to his credentials and connections, not his productive imagination. My recommendations for must-hear Muhal albums (he’s released more than two dozen under his own name, and many with collaborators including Kenny Dorham, Woody Shaw, Clifford Jordan, Marion Brown, Robin Kenyatta).

Levels and Degrees of Light — Muhal’s recording debut as a leader, on the eerie title track he plays clarinet to vibes and wordless vocal; “My Thoughts of the Future, Now and Forever”  feature Braxton and Kalaparusha; there’s a long poem intoned by it’s author David Moore, and originally the mix was too reverberant, but that’s been adjusted — so the music is clearly dramatic, stark and expressionistic.

Things to Come from Those Now Gone — Muhal’s third record for Chicago’s Delmark Records is compositionally compact. His second, Young at Heart/Wise in Time is good, but loose and discursive. This one is by turns tuneful, angular and ruminative. No two tracks are alike.

Three Compositions of the New Jazz — Anthony Braxton’s unique system of compositional organization is nascent, but already well-developed, and time becomes suspended during the course of these pieces realized by an ensemble that had no precedent in jazz back in its day: Leo Smith on trumpet, Leroy Jenkins on violin, Muhal on piano.

Fanfare for the Warriors –– The Art Ensemble of Chicago was the first AACM band to get a grant (funding this record), the first to leave for Paris, the first to deck itself out in facepaint the better to sell its “show” without compromising it’s “Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future.” Muhal sits in with Bowie, Mitchell, Jarman, Favors and Moyé. We’d never heard them with a pianist before, and Muhal’s approach is a true enhancement.

Excursions — Eddie Harris growls through his amplified and processed sax, bells tinkle (that might be Muhal!), and there’s a lot of bluesy, hummable hard-boppish in what was originally a double-lp, meant to sum up all the things Harris and his colleagues could be. Nice reminder that humans can have many faces, and Chicago’s South Side is a font of jams.

Sightsong —  Malachi Favors Maghoustut was the model of a steady, pliant bassist and Muhal’s part in their improvised duets becomes particularly warm, flush with melody.

Blu blu blu — Early in AACM history Muhal convened the Experimental Band, which never recorded. The orchestra on Blu blu blu isn’t that, but as a 12-tet with whistler Joel Brandon and guitarist David Fiuczynski among unexpected soloists shows off Muhal’s larger, Ellington-informed vision.

The Hearinga Suite — Another large ensemble work — ambitious and well realized — throughout which Muhal integrates electronic synthesizer, sparingly but effectively.  Exotic sounds abound.

Sweet Earth Flying — Marion Brown was a composer and alto saxophonist with a gift for lyrical tenderness. Muhal was an excellent accompanist for him, credited for piano, electric piano and organ him on Sweet Earth Flying, on which Paul Bley also performs, credited on the same three instruments. SWF has been paired for reissue with Brown’s other recording for Impulse!, GeeGee Recollections (no Muhal, but Leo Smith and Streve McCall). Makes for a treat.

Streaming — Muhal teams with Roscoe Mitchell (reeds) and George Lewis (trombone and computer) to conjure music of indecipherable scale. It may best be heard, the first few times through, as an unfolding soundtrack, though I couldn’t help wondering what sounds were soft but magnified, which loud but contextualized to seem otherwise. The best approach may be to listen with several perspectives in mind; that seems to be how the music came to be. Challenges whatever you’re used to!

All the cover paintings above (except for that on Fanfare for the Warriors) are by Muhal Richard Abrams.

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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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