Oleg Kireyev, born in Bashkiria (aka Bashkortostan, more on which follows), is a dynamite soprano and tenor saxophonist who smiles broadly when he asks audiences to chime in with Mongolian throat-singing and quick-tonguing techniques. In New York City, a small group of listeners at Symphony Space complied, giving Kireyev’s Feng Shui Theatre quartet, making its […]

Another victim of global economics? Or of flawed leadership? The 40-year-old International Association for Jazz Education has announced its bankruptcy, following an ill-attended conference in Toronto and unexpected departures by its executive director and president. “Industry of jazz” players are shocked, shocked! 

Way out northwest last weekend for the Experience Music Project’s 7th Annual Pop Conference, I also visited Earshot Jazz fest and concert producer John Gilbreath doing his weekly late night show “Jazz Theater” on KEXP.org.  Listen to Ornette Coleman’s “Law Years” and a track from his concerto grosso “Skies of America,” as well as Miles […]

Who presents and supports the articulation of ambitious thinking about American vernacular music? The Experience Music Project/Science Fiction Museum (Seattle’s answer to NYC’s American Museum of Natural History?) holds its seventh annual Pop Conference April 10 – 13, with dozens of scholars, journalists and musicians giving 20-minute run-throughs of their specialities on panels regarding the […]

It’s a sad day when an established stage for national and local jazz closes, as JazzWest.com’s Wayne Saroyan reports will happen to Jazz at Pearl’s in San Francisco’s North Beach (right across the street from City Lights Books ) at the end of April. One such closing does not signal a trend; small independent venues come and go. […]

Further Ornette sightings: the prophet of life-beyond-conventions returns on Friday to New York’s Town Hall, where he’s suffered and triumphed throughout his career.

A one-time-only revisitation of the late Eric Dolphy‘s masterpiece at Merkin Concert Hall in NYC fulfilled the promise and hope of jazz repertory concerts, and proved the enduring, enriching quality of jazz-beyond-jazz compositions.

“They want the oil/but they don’t want the people,” Jayne Cortez declaimed over and over again, her inflections expressing frank assessment, sheer disbelief, scathing cynicism and many nuances in between, without ever stipulating who “they” or “the people” are. She didn’t have to, we all knew. It was Saturday night at Sistas’ Place, a storefront […]

In Portland, Ornette Coleman and his drummer son Denardo sat for an hour-plus public interview with me. We talked about music, sound, love, death, race relations, progress and/or the lack of, language, the alphabet — Ornette’s frequent topics. Here’s the whole thing, as an audio file recorded by KMHD-FM. howardmandel.com Subscribe by Email or RSS […]

The resident blogger is flattered that so many readers stick up for the rights of reviewers to do what they do. He’s also amused at one reader’s suggestion that John Zorn regards professional opinions so highly he’d prefer to suppress them.

John Zorn asked writers not to review his performance opening the season at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, though he was pleased we wanted to attend. How can/should an arts journalist comply?

An arts journalism/literary detour: Alain Robbe-Grillet deserves better than the clip job and interview bites the New York Times’s Rachel Donadio afforded him on the editorial page last weekend. His cinematic and, yes, avant-garde jazz-like (fractured, abstracted, jagged, nagging, rhythmically repetitious, cool to the point of cruel) writing style and his frequent themes (the impossibility […]