Pursuant to online debates about whether grants and fellowships are good for jazz — here’s a report on the non-profit Meet the Composer‘s choice of 31 recipients for $300,000 towards realization of commissions. Only one jazz-related project among them: composer-guitarist Joel Harrison, commissioned by the Brooklyn-based organization Connection Works, to write for a large ensemble. However, three […]
best review ever of Miles Ornette Cecil — Jazz Beyond Jazz
I’m humbled by writer-poet-performance artist Kirpal Gordon‘s appreciation of and insight into my book on the avant garde through the models of Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor, in the just-posted NOLA issue of Big Bridge magazine. He’s captured my intent and says I accomplished what I meant to. See if you agree.  howardmandel.com […]
Summertime, and the listening should be easy
My latest column in City Arts-New York is now online, with pick hits for free August concerts in NYC. I don’t suggest the season’s not right for serious, substantial music, just that we would appreciate the surrounding circumstances being comfortable and hassle-free. Here’s the opening graph, meant to set the tone and keep you reading […]
Backlash against grants for jazz?
Nate Chinen, estimable New York Times music journalist, questions the effect of grants like the $253,000 announced by Chamber Music America for jazz composers: Are applicants pressed to create overly grand and pc projects? Ottawa Citizen blogger Peter Hum asks why Canada’s government supports jazz at all. But Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra leader Arturo O’Farrill has been commissioned to write a […]
Earma Thompson, unheralded piano jazz star, dies at 86
A Chicago mainstay, whose efforts supported local and touring musicians starting in the early ’40s but who didn’t record under her own name until 2004, Earma Thompson deserves to be celebrated as an outstanding example of how women have participated in jazz often more than is acknowledged, from behind the scenes. As the Chicago Tribune’s […]
Mandela Day African music fest, Brooklyn
Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Cyndi Lauper with Li’l Kim, Dave Stewart and French first-lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy celebrated Nobel laureate Nelson Mandela‘s 91st birthday July 18 at a heavily reported Radio City Music Hall concert, but in Prospect Park Nigeria’s King Sunny Adé headlined a free five-act, seven-hour pan-African Celebrate Brooklyn! show drawing some 20,000 people. No reviews […]
Fast impressions, new jazz ‘n’ out cds
I’m determined to try to survey unusual and promising new jazz-and-beyond cds with regularity — here are responses (not in-depth reviews) to only half-a-dozen grabbed off my teetering in-pile almost at random, plus related diversions. The scale: 5 stars “You gotta hear this”; 4 – “very interesting, if interested in this sort of thing”; 3 — […]
On magazine’s circulation figures
Jazz Times was credited with 100,000 circulation in virtually all press accounts of its recent transfer of ownership — which with annual subscription rate of nearly $24 per year suggests annual income from readership alone (there’s income from ads, too) easily be in excess of $2 million dollars. But as I noted in my last […]
More on Jazz Times
Madavor Media company director Joan Lynch confirmed acquisition of Jazz Times magazine today, pledging to settle the suspended publication’s unpaid debts, to go for editorial continuity, to maintain its 10-times-a-year print schedule and website, and to keep its two top editors.  “As part of Madavor, I’m excited to have Jazz Times to work on — we […]
Jazz mag revived?
Jazz Times, the monthly which suspended publication in May, has been bought by Madavor Media and will print an August issue produced by its familiar staff and contributors, according to today’s New York Times. Boston-based Madavor counts International Figure Skating, Volleyball and The Best of Northeast Golf among its “core titles,” having acquired Doll, a […]
Jazz health, bright moments
All is not dismal in Jazzville: Producer George Wein has found a title sponsor — CareFusion — for his jazz festivals in Newport next month and New York City summer 2010. SFJazz has announced a stellar lineup including Ornette Coleman for its fall fest, Oct. 10 – Nov. 21. As Mitch Myers reports from the […]
In lieu of JVC Jazz festivals
Did you miss the “festivity” of June jazz concerts in major Manhattan venues — or did you find ways of coping without them? There’s so much fine music — jazz and beyond — in nearby festive settings, many of them out-of-doors, that the absence of a 38-year-old institution doesn’t seem to have made much stir. […]
Zx1 pocket camera stars at 2009 Jazz Awards!
I love My Youtube! — now hosting video clips from my handy new Kodak go-anywhere device of jazz celebs, players and presenters at the Jazz Journalists Association’s 13th annual Jazz Awards party at the Jazz Standard (NYC) June 16, shot by debuting cinematographer R. Mandel. Brief bits of Hank Jones, the Charles Tolliver Big Band, Jane Bunnett‘s Spirits […]