After last Friday’s summit on new media affecting those who write, read and listen produced by the National Arts Journalism Program/USC Anneberg Center, I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s Future of Music Coalition session “Critical Condition: The Future of Music Journalism.” It comes as a climax of the FMC’s Sunday-through-Tuesday “Policy Summit” on digital options and challenges […]
Last week in New York beyond jazz
The season for creative music opened with several roars: Ornette Coleman triumphed at Jazz at Lincoln Center – Postive Catastrophe at the New Languages Festival was an absolute delight — Los Angeles trumpeter Bobby Bradford lead an ace quintet at the Festival of New Trumpets at the Jazz Standard — and those are only the gigs I […]
Jazz journalism and the NAJP’s arts journalism summit
The Jazz Journalists Association, of which I’m president, has hope to produce a nationwide conference on media transitions and how currently active professionals cope with them. Today’s National Arts Journalism Program’s summit raises many of the issues and even more questions that challenge my colleagues and I. So I’m going to do some live blogging […]
City Arts, my jazz-in-the-City column
Welcome to City Arts, which bucks a trend by evolving from being a monthly section in NYPress and other Manhattan neighborhood free papers to becoming New York’s Review of Culture, a new twice-monthly stand-alone print edition and website. Beside my column, there are season previews of classical music, mustn’t miss museums exhibits (Kandinsky! Blake! Monet! O’Keefe!), books, dance, […]
Best American city for jazz? Chicago
I’m a Chicago homie — long removed but never really gone — so don’t expect objectivity, but a recent visit proved my native metropolis is #1 in America and maybe everywhere for its active, creative, meaningful, almost-economically-viable, neighborhood-rooted, exploratory and world class jazz. I say this even as my dearly adopted New York City kickstarts as […]
Today’s the day NYC goes beyond jazz
On September 17,New York kicks off a fall season more highly charged with new creative energies than any in memory. An army of mostly young, skilled, ambitious and devoted musicians is making itself heard in the East Village, Soho, Brooklyn, on the Lower West Side and in the clubs — while benevolence is cast by the first […]
#jazzlives weekend update: 12-day count of tweeting fans
Buzz about who played live jazz where marked with the hashtage #jazzlives flew throughout cyberspace this weekend — catch it all here. The impromptu campaign produced anecdotal evidence that a young and vigorous audience for America’s modern vernacular creative music does indeed exist, spreading enthusiastic word via the social network Twitter of sets at Chicago, […]
#jazzlives: listeners tweet from across the U.S.
Audiences for live jazz from East Coast to West, North border to South, all points between and some beyond are using Twitter and the hashtag #jazzlives to buzz about bands and venues they like. A campaign begun to encourage “anecdotal evidence” that demonstrates a vibrant listenership for America’s indigenous music has resulted in hundreds of […]
Social networking does its #jazzlives stuff
Start a Twitter campaign, and see what happens! Do as many people hear live jazz in a week as attended Woodstock, say? Using the hashtag #jazzlives, a rough count is underway, supported by independent jazz activists, musicians, festivals, journalists but most of all the listeners themselves. It’s a lesson in how people participate in culture […]
You’ve heard live jazz ? Tweet using #jazzlives
Let’s prove jazz lives. Tweet about live performances using hashmark #jazzlives, detailing who and when in 140 characters. Jazz fests rage across America in the next couple of weeks starting Aug. 29-30 with NYC’s Charlie Parker fest, picking up Sept 4 through 6  – Tanglewood, Chicago, Detroit, the Angel City Jazz Fest, LA’s Sweet & Hot Music […]
Tonight Show band all-stars, slammin’ at NYC’s Blue Note
Guitarist Kevin Eubanks and drummer Marvin “Smitty” Smith in a rare East Coast five-night stand — you don’t have to know a thing about “jazz” to get into their quintet’s masterful, exciting, funky, complex, improvised, folky, powerful, inspired sounds. A night at a Manhattan club can be costly, yes, but sets of this calibre make it all […]
Les Paul’s tongue
In 2004, photog Gene Martin asked the guitarist/inventor who’d just received the Jazz Journalists Association’s “A Team” award for activists, advocates, altruists, aiders and abettors of jazz, to pose for a portrait. . .
Best DC jazz presenter: Kennedy Center
The Kennedy Center presents more jazz in 2009-10 than all the other US government cultural institutions combined — some 40 concerts of new and established talent in all styles. No surprise, public performance being the Center’s reason for being, while the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution are mandated for research and archival activities. […]