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Celebrating jazz excellence — Awards, honors and privileges

The NEA zeroes out its Jazz Masters program, the Grammys cuts categories so pop best-sellers regain prominence vis a vis less obviously commercial stars, but the Jazz Journalists Association’s 15th annual Jazz Awards — to be held June 11, 2011 with an afternoon gala with all star music at City Winery, NYC, satellite parties hosted by prominent fans and grass roots organizations around the U.S. and streaming live video on the web at www.JJAJazzAwards.org — hails loud and clear the achievements of the jazz music and media makers. (See that website for a list of all the nominees).

Pianist Randy Weston, trumpeter Wallace Roney’s Sextet, soprano sax/flutist Jane Bunnett with pianist Hilario Duran, and the Hammer Klavier Trio from Hamburg will play up a storm at the gala to further demonstrate the power and beauty of what we’re talking about. This photo of orchestra leader Maria Schneider the year she won four Jazz Awards shows what such honors can mean to a musician.

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South African jazz hero Zim Nqgawana dies, age 52

Neil Tesser has written an informative post about Zim Nqgawana, the South African jazz musician who died at age 52 of a stroke May 10. Ngqawana, whose name is pronounced with a glottal “click” between the “N” and first “a,” performed at the 2007 Columbia/Harlem Festival of Global Jazz,” curated by George E. Lewis of Columbia University’s Center for Jazz Studies, Nqgawana, with his quartet, in that concertÂ struck meÂ as a powerful and original saxophonist and flutist, improvising with a heightened lyricism no doubt inspired by John Coltrane’s late period sound, but standing on its own. (photo by Dragan Tasic).

photo Â©Dragan Tasic

His music that night (and onÂ Zimology, his one album I’ve heard) had little overt reference to the South Africa of, say, Paul Simon’s Graceland; rather, it was stately (at times as deep as that of sombre pianist Abdullah Ibrahim) and dynamic like the best of trumpeter Hugh Masekela — with whom Nqgawana had worked — but with no pop or commercial aspirations. The Mail and Guardian Online headlines Nqgawana as a “genius,” which is a tricky term, but I have admired and can recommend his music, and be sorry that he’ll play no more.Â (PS and full disclosure: The Columbia/Harlem Fest also hosted the first and so far only convention of international jazz journalists in the U.S.” “Jazz in the Global Imagination,” co-produced by the Jazz Journalists Association, of which I’m pres. . .)

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CityArts New York June jazz fests bustin’ out-all-over supplement

CityArts New York let me play jazz supplement editor. Read my lead feature on upcoming in June the NYC Blue Note Jazz Festival, UnDead Festival, gigs everywhere and more respect!

Also Kurt Gottschalk on the Vision Festival’s backstory, David Adler on three successful, smart, younger jazzers, snapshots of Brazilian drummer Adriano Santos, Korean singer (of Portuguese Yeahwon Shin and soul-tinged singer songwriter Laura Cheadle by Ernest Barteldes, and the big band w/classical Asian instruments Project Hansori led by Jeff Fairbanks, by Emilie Pons.

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Steve Reich @ Carnegie Hall @ 75, with devotees

Steve Reich, courtesy of the artist

Composer Steve Reich, age 75, knows secrets of correlating pulsating rhythms and interlocking layers of sycopated melodic patterns which he’s eager to reveal in every work he writes. His musical signature is so unwavering it might veer into self-parody, but for the vigor and commitment of his performers. At Carnegie Hall last night four energized new music ensembles poured enthusiasm, precision and a sense of discovery into four recent Reich pieces, making their Master’s overlays, cycles and cells variously delightful, ominous, rockin’, tense, melodramatic and exotic. Reich writes music that’s both reassuring and subversive, and his 75th birthday concert at Carnegie Hall provided both in delicate yet confidentÂ balance.

Reich’s music is distinctive, certainly, unlike that of any of the other composers around his age he’s been linked to for their common use of repetition, or seeming repetition,and consonant harmonies (as opposed to that old atonal or 12-tone stuff). Mallet Quartet (2008) played by So Percussion, WTC 9/11 (a commissioned debut) by Kronos Quartet, 2×5 performed by Bang on a Can Allstars and Friends and Double Sextet with eighth blackbird joining the Allstars may not be Â Reich’s deepest or most ambitious pieces, but they provide pleasures, live in the moment and make the moment live — not easy things however smoothly the music goes down, and what we hope for from all music, though in contemporary composition we (the editorial “we”) are often disappointed.

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Creative Music Studio, Woodstock at Columbia U and East Village

My CityArts – New York column is about the Creative Music Symposium, organized by Karl Berger, pianist/vibist with his wife Ingrid Sertso, who cofounded with free-thinking Ornette Coleman of the Creative Music Studio in Woodstock NY (1972-1984). The symposium at Columbia University’s Center for Jazz Studies (directed by trombonist and digital music innovator George E. Lewis, once a CMS student/participant) last weekend dipped into the history and practices of the CMS, a paradise where cross-genre visionary improvisers (Don Cherry, Anthony Braxton, Cecil Taylor, Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette, et al), composer/interpreters (Pauline Oliveros, Frederic Rzewski) and “world music” fusionists (Olatunji, Nana Vasconcelos) taught through oral transmission in an immersion setting.

Back in the day I wished I was musician enough to attend the Woodstock sessions, and as a budding writer was frustrated there was nowhere comparable to go — so moderating a symposium panel felt like I got to CMS at last.

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Central Brooklyn Jazz Fest reiterates jazz/race divide

The Central Brooklyn Jazz Festival, during what the Smithsonian Institution promotes asÂ Jazz Appreciation Month, is a powerful statement of hard core, grass-roots support for the music Congress has ratified as “a rare and valuable American national treasure.”Â My City Arts column reports on how the fest and other Brooklyn jazz activities, despite best intentions, reprise the distances and suspicions people of diverse backgrounds hold about each other.

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Subotnick, Lillevan, Unsound make Lincoln Center an electric circus

MortonÂ Subotnick re-mixes original materials of his prophetic and unprecedented late ’60s Â electronic music classic “Silver Apples of the Moon” with kinetic imagery by video artistÂ LillevanÂ tonight (April 7)Â at the Rubenstein atrium of Lincoln Center –Â as detailed in myÂ columnÂ in City Arts – New York. It’s free as part of the 11-dayÂ Unsound Festival,Â an extraordinary schedule of new and unusual multi-media works presented by theÂ Fundcja Tone of Krakow with theÂ Polish Cultural Institute in New YorkÂ and theÂ Goethe-Institute New York. Subotnick performs again tomorrow (April 8) at Greenwich House Music School (also NYC), 6 pm.

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Jazz, blues & beyond in Amman: Pops, Bird, Diz, Lady Day @ UJordan

I spoke on jazz and blues at the University of Jordan, a modern 45,000-student institution, in an event sponsored by the American Embassy while in Amman on family matters a couple weeks ago. About 50 avid students of music, arts and literature and their informed faculty watched videos of Louis Armstrong at age 32 doing “Dinah,”Â Charlie Parker & Dizzy Gillespie playing “Hot House,”Â Billie Holiday with all-stars singing “Fine and Mellow”Â and Muddy Waters among other immortals from the American Folk Blues Festival, 1962-69, vol. 3.Â I talked about blues and jazz being one in essence, but different in practice. Then second-year Jordanian student Nabil Gonzalez played banjo, harmonic and sang two original numbers in a U.S. folkie style. “I’m passionately in love with bluegrass music!” Gonzalez told me. Other of the young people were eager for jazz and blues, but said they had little access to the music or information about it.

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Beyond jazz, in and to Jordan

Jordan’s capitol Amman isn’t an obvious hot spot for jazz, yet I found interest, knowledge and exciting players during my visit there a couple weeks ago — from which I’m barely recovered. A couple of postings and I hope a video of bass guitarist Yacoub Abu Ghosh‘s band from its weekly Tuesday night gig at Canvas will follow. For now my video on Petra, my brother and sis-in-law as guides to an ancient city carved from rosy mountain rock, where taxes on caravans coming through their pass supported a culture of some 50,000 people, at home in caves.

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UNsafe concert: Threadgill, La Barbara, ACO dare to fail

“Playing It UNsafe” is how the American Composers Orchestra characterizes tonight’s concert of works by Henry Threadgill, Joan La Barbara, Sean Friar and Laura Schwendinger at Zankel Hall, NYC. Afraid of classical musicians improvising? Multi-layered “sound paintings” of multi-tracked voice, electronic ambiance and instrumentalists sitting in the audience? Symphonic and light collaborations? Then walk on the wild side — or at least watch the fine videos by Jeremy Robins — like the two of Threadgill explaining his ACO-sponsored research and development project, below —

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President Obama digs Sonny Rollins

President Barack Obama paid beautiful lip service to great American artists and arts yesterday, conferring the 2010 National Medal of Arts and Humanities on heroes including Sonny Rollins, age 80. “I speak personally here,” said the president at 3 minutes, 30 seconds into his address, alluding to authors, poets, historians, “because there are people here whose works shaped me. I’ve got these thumbworn editions of these works of arts, and these old records from when they were still vinyl, Sonny, before they went digital, that helped inspire me, or get me through a tough day, or take risks that I might not otherwise have taken, and I think what’s true for me is true for everyone here and true for our country.” Amen to that. Sonny takes his bows at minute 16, after Quincy Jones, before James Taylor.

But the House of Representatives disagrees, cutting the entire $40 million Arts in Education program of the U.S. Department of Education on the heels of cutting the National Endowment for the Arts budget by 26%, largest slashing in 16 years.

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Toxic Gowanus, Brooklyn neighb of new music lofts

Gowanus, a Brooklyn neighborhood so unlovely it’s been named an EPA superfund site, is Ground Zero now for music lofts, as reported in my new City Arts-New York column. In a half dozen or so artist-run spaces — including IBeam, Douglas Street Collective, Littlefield, the Brooklyn Lyceum and Issue Project Room — available for presentation and rehearsal of hard-core experimental sounds, dance, video and performance art, the programming is typically spiky, ambitious and unsentimental.

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NEA ends Jazz, Folk, Opera awards for “full range of American artists”

National Endowment for the Arts’ FY-12 budget eliminates a 30-year-old Jazz Masters Awards program, and special recognition with National Heritage Fellowships and Opera honors, in favor of Artist of the Year Awards available for the entire spectrum of performing artists (all forms of music and theater as one). Here’s the NEA’s statement, issued through a spokesperson, regarding its “modification of honorifics,” in response to some issues I alluded to yesterday, which seem sure to reverberate with diverse effects throughout the U.S.’s far-flung and various jazz communities.

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