My new City Arts column is reviews of newly released recordings by Henry Cole and the Afro-Beat Collective, Steve Lehman Trio, Less Magnetic, Esperanza Spalding, Michael Bates and Wayne Escoffrey. You may have to pick up a hard-copy of the paper for that. But the issue also features my interview with Limor Tomer, the Metropolitan Museum’s recently appointed […]

My Brooklyn neighborhood, called Kensington, is full of musicians, because residences are large and still semi-affordable. So I hear the guitarist across the street get excited while practicing, run into NEA Jazz Master pianist Kenny Barron when walking to the bakery and go to Sycamore, a flower shop-bar with basement recital room where  on Sunday […]

Locked Down is The Black Keys guitarist-songwriter Dan Auerbach’s collaboration with Mac “Dr. John” Rebennack — the two premiere it April 5 – 7 at Brooklyn Academy of Music, second program of three the good Dr. presents there over three consecutive weekends. I bet it’ll be a better-produced show than his “Tribute to Louis Armstrong,” the […]

A followup: the Asia Society posted the  entire video of the  3.5 hour wayang kulit (shadow puppet and Javanese gamelan orchestra performance) that I wrote about Sunday — the one in which President Obama stopped by — in five parts. And colleague Richard Gehr wrote up the event for the Village Voice blog. howardmandel.com Subscribe by […]

President Obama made a surprise cameo appearance at the Asia Society’s production of a Javanese shadow puppet show  — a Wayang Kulit — by dhalang Ki Purbo Asmoro with Gamelan Kusuma Laras on Manhattan’s upper east side on Friday night (March 16). As a translucent strip of water buffalo hide, upright if not as nimble on his tusk-bone rods […]

The Herbie Hancock who concertized at Jazz at Lincoln Center last Saturday night was the casually joking yet research-minded fusion meister. A review of his Friday night concert by Jon Pareles in the New York Times takes a generous view of Hancock darting among his multitude of possibilities, but I was less taken by his […]

European jazz stars of the Zurich-based record label Intakt come to the Stone, John Zorn’s serious recital room, for a two-week fest March 1 – 15 in which they’ll collaborate with veterans of NYC’s downtown improv scene. I detail some of the shows — and why people think jazz is better loved abroad than at […]

Guitarist John McLaughlin‘s Mahavishnu Orchestra was the highest-flying of any ensemble emerging from Miles Davis’ jazz-rock initiative in the early 1970s, establishing a previously unapproached standard of virtuosity, improvisational excitement and commercial success for all-instrumental electric bands to follow. Drummer G. Calvin Weston‘s Treasures of the Spirit quintet playing music of McLaughlin’s MO at the 92nd […]

Jose Reyes of the online listening station Jazz Con Class has posted  a Q&A with me about “free jazz” and “the avant-garde” — which he proposes as two distinct subgenres of jazz, tied to the 1960s.  New things — innovations — thinking outside the box — breaks from conventions and the continuum of progress (evolution) — these […]

Of 10 American novels critic Terry Teachout posted yesterday that he wishes he’d written, only All The King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren similarly appeals to me. I can imagine hunkering down as Penn Warren did, dryly but fiercely etching the sickness of American populist politics, which we’re seeing swirl at its sickest this very  primary season. It would […]