I’m as sad as any Chicago-born & raised movie fan about the death of Roger Ebert, who I saw regularly in the Chicago Sun Times/Chicago Daily News offices when I was a copyboy there in the ’70s, but to whom I never spoke. And I take umbrage at the characterization of him as a “middle-brow” […]

Jazz in NYC and vicinity early in Jazz Appreciation Month: Since Monday, April 1 I’ve — heard the all-star Monterey Jazz Fest on Tour band at the Blue Note Jazz Club, and singer Imani Uzuri w/band there, too; learned about the James Moody Democracy in Jazz Festival (sponsored by TD Bank) at the New Jersey […]

April is Jazz Appreciation Month (so named by the Smithsonian Institution), culminating on the 30th with International Jazz Day (a project of UNESCO, organized by the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz) — and both those initiatives are endorsed by the U.S. Conference of Mayors. So the Jazz Journalists Association has launched a major media campaign called […]

It was a big deal in Stockton, CA last Friday, when Wynton Marsalis led his Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra at the 12th annual jazz festival produced by the Brubeck Institute at University of the Pacific.  The ticket holders’ line to enter the nicely restored Fox movie palace — now the Bob Hope Theatre, in the center […]

One-of-a-kind American master musical artist Cecil Taylor turns 84 today, March 25, and deserves our culture’s gratitude. His life has been one of relentless, intense, sweeping creativity, which has driven global developments in composition, improvisation, performance, attire and contemporary lifestyle to a much greater degree than has been much acknowledged —  although Taylor does have […]

Ornette Coleman turns 83 today — and is celebrating it privately. That’s unusual, as he has thrown great parties, often full of live music (at his former Harlem Studio and one year at Joe’s Pub), always attended by fabulously interesting people — like the one last year for his 82nd birthday, Friday, March 9, 2012 […]

Dr. Donald Byrd was a trumpeter with an ear for the vernacular and fresh talent. Jayne Cortez was a radical poet — both esthetically and personally. Butch Morris was a jazz cornetist, composer, conductor and conductioner. Let’s celebrate the lives and creativity of all three. Strangely, reports by a nephew of Byrd’s death at age 80 on February 4 […]

Greg Tate, author-essayist as well as guitarist-leader of the Butch Morris “conductioned” band Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber,n looked for his evidently unpublished liner notes to the planned 25th anniversary reissue on CD of Morris’ Conduction #1, Racism in Modern America, a work in Progress. He couldn’t find them. Tate emailed : “hey man those […]

The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra came to play with saxophonist Wayne Shorter‘s quartet at Carnegie Hall Friday, Feb 1, and — though conductorless — showed the cohesion and verve that will make a jazz-with-symphony program a triumph. If Shorter’s writing and improvisations had matched their readiness, the night could have been truly historic. This orchestra, celebrating […]

My maybe unpublished 25th anniversary liner notes for Conduction #1, Current Trends in Racism in Modern America, A Work in Progress, by the late Butch Morris with all-star improvisers, recorded 28 years ago today (Feb 1, 2013) and sonically as relevant as ever.  [The cast is: Frank Lowe, tenor sax; John Zorn, alto sax and […]

Lawrence Douglas “Butch” Morris, one of the most brilliant and musically generous of artists who emerged from New York’s East Village in the 1980s as an experimental cornetist, composer of melodies and settings, and instigator of the burgeoning act of Conduction (a term he copyrighted), died January 29 of cancer at age 65, and the […]

The National Endowment for the Arts is not in its essence a presenting organization. Its annual productions of ceremonies inducting new Jazz Masters, like the one at Dizzy’s Club in Jazz at Lincoln Center on January 14,  are special projects, probably stretching the Endowment’s resources of staff, finances, time and energy. I commented in my last […]