Jon Batiste and his band Stay Human were among the emerging young charismatics vying to revitalize jazz at the 2013 Newport Jazz Festival, August 10th and 11th, and as a post-modern New Orleans piano professor  of “social music” he approached his art from many directions. A scion of five-generation Louisianan musical royalty, 26-year-old Batiste can […]

“People don’t know the blues,” guitarist/singer/songwriter Buddy Guy, who turned 77 today, told a packed house at Iridium Jazz Club  in NYC last night. The show was video-taped, presumably for a PBS showing next fall. “They say the blues is sad, but when B.B. King sings ‘I got a sweet little angel, I love the […]

Last night I improvised a profile of Cecil Taylor for BBC Newshour (June 21, “Severe Flooding in India“), on the announcement that the great pianist/composer/improviser has been honored with the prestigious, $500,000 Kyoto Award. My triptych Miles Ornette Cecil – Jazz Beyond Jazz, of course, includes a lot of my writing/thinking on Cecil — who I aver is […]

Cecil Taylor, whose intense, lengthy and complex piano improvisations have redefined jazz and redesigned his instrument, has been awarded the 2013 Kyoto Prize for “Arts and Philosophy: Music.” Former recipients include Olivier Messiaen, John Cage, Iannis Xenakis, György Ligeti, Pierre Boulez, Witold Lutoslawski and Nikolaus Harnoncourt — all musicians/composers of Western European classical lineage. Prizes for individuals who […]

Some places news still travels slowly: Photographer Sánta István Csaba, based in Budapest, just learned of the untimely death on May 29 of  pianist and educator Mulgrew Miller, and sent three portraits of the highly regarded, largely beloved man that Mulgrew’s people will want to see:                 Santá […]

Congrats to Bob Koester, indie owner and producer of Chicago’s Delmark Records, on the label’s 60th anniversary, which it celebrated over the weekend — and lucky are listeners to jazz beyond jazz for the broad yet niche-like taste that has informed his Quixotic efforts from the start. Not that I was there in 1953. No […]

I’m just thrilled UNESCO partnered with the Monk Institute to produce the second International Jazz Day, April 30 — the culmination of Jazz Appreciation Month (so designated by the Smithsonian Institute) and what the Jazz Journalists Assoc., over which I preside, called JazzApril. The rest of this post might be considered self-promoting, ’cause I’m going […]

On the second International Jazz Day, let’s celebrate — 1) A glorious legacy of enduring music; 2) The dedication to the art form of musicians and their supporters now, worldwide; 3) The recognition by government officials and institutions of jazz as an entity that will not be silenced or co-opted; 4) Access as never before, via […]

Five jazz-associated composers took on the heady task of writing eight-minute works for full symphonic forces, introduced to the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and worked up for performance by conductor Matt Kraemer on Tuesday and Wednesday this past week, thanks to Earshot /Jazz Composers Orchestra Initiative, organized by American Composers Orchestra. As an “embedded journalist” (along with […]

Is it hard to sustain four weeks of Jazz Appreciation Month? With the defeat of gun-control measures, bombings in Boston, ricin attacks on the President, fertilizer explosions in Texas — promotion of jazz as a positive cultural entity might have seemed less than relevant. But when I addressed students at New York University’s Tisch School of the […]

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 […]